Turquoise Half Sphere Necklace

Drops of clustered "caviar" balls, each inset with turquoise, hang from this silver necklace, the massed granulation giving the piece its texture and the blue stone its points of color. The caviar of tiny applied balls is a granular vocabulary the workshop used to build surface, here organized into pendant drops.

Turquoise was among the native stones the Taxco school drew into a modern idiom; it was one of the materials, with gold, jade, and obsidian, brought to wide public attention by the 1932 Tomb 7 finds at Monte Albán that fed the design imagination of the period (Morrill, p. 38). This necklace dates to the workshop's First Design Period.

With no further period documentation recorded for the piece, it stands as a characteristic example of the workshop's granulated, stone-set First Period jewelry.