Many visitors to the American South West come back with turquoise jewellery: the Native American people of Arizona and New Mexico exploited local sources, and modern craftsmen have developed a prosperous industry. Thirty years ago the archaeological scientists Garman Harbottle and Edward Sayre used neutron activation analysis to show that turquoise mosaics from Mexico, found as far away as the great Maya city of Chichén Itzá in Yucatan and dating back to around AD900, used raw material originating in the Cerrillos mines between Albuquerque and Santa Fe in New Mexico, an overland distance of some 3,200 km (2,000 miles). It was assumed that the Cerrillos mines had also supplied more local demand, for instance from the Chaco Canyon communities west of Santa Fe. A new technique of source characterisation, using hydrogen and copper isotope ratios established by secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), shows that this picture was altogether too simple.

Sharon Hull and her colleagues report in the Journal of Archaeological Science this month that of eleven samples from Chaco Canyon sites, dating from AD550 to 1050, only two could be attributed to the Cerrillos source. Two others came from Orogrande in southern New Mexico, three from the No 8 Mine in northern Nevada, and one from the Montezuma source in southern Nevada.

Although none of the Mexican mosaics has yet been re-examined in detail, this looks like a good idea: not only the Chichén Itzá pieces, but Aztec turquoise mosaics, such as those in the British Museum’s Mexican Gallery, could well yield evidence that ancient trade networks in late pre-Columbian America were much more complex than we have assumed.

Journal of Archaeological Science 35; 1355-1369

In search of Tudor England

Our ideas about Tudor England are based on a combination of words and images: Shakespeare’s plays and Holbein’s portraits, for example, Norman Hammond writes. Sometimes they can be misleading: Olivier’s film-set reconstruction of the Globe for Henry V misled the builders of its modern successor, despite contrary archaeological evidence from the excavations of the Rose Playhouse a few yards away.

The Rose was a salutary reminder that archaeology has a vital role to play in understanding Tudor culture, and a series of recent excavations have underlined this, as a special section in Current Archaeology this month shows. While Henry VIII was responsible for creating many bare ruined choirs across England with his dissolution of the monasteries, both he and his daughter Elizabeth I also stimulated their followers to impressive building feats, as courtiers constructed country palaces fit to receive a monarch.

Acton Court, at Iron Acton near Bristol, is a case in point: Sir Nicholas Poyntz, a newly risen gentleman, built an entire new wing to accommodate Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn on their western visit of 1535. Poyntz inherited the 13th-century manor improved in the French Flamboyant style around 1500 by his grandfather, but in early 1535 he began major rebuilding in anticipation of the royal visit. Tree-ring dating of roof timbers in the new east wing shows that they were felled that spring, while contemporary records of the King’s progress report a weekend stay at Acton Court on August 21-23.

The new wing was 105ft (32.3 metres) long and 32ft high. On the first floor three well-lit large rooms, each with a fireplace and garderobe, provided a presence chamber, privy chamber and bedchamber for the royal couple. Painted friezes in the fashionable antike classical style are so accomplished that metropolitan artists may have been called in, the official report by Kirsty Rodwell and Robert Bell suggests.

Another and more successful courtier was Sir Henry Lee, Elizabeth I’s spin-doctor. He was the principal creator of her cult and had an estate at Quarrendon just outside Aylesbury, where in anticipation of a visit from the Queen in 1592 he developed elaborate gardens along the north bank of the Thames. Paul Everson, of English Heritage, has studied the site and carried out a detailed survey of the surviving earthworks in 1989-90. In this carefully created artificial landscape can be seen the ways in which the Elizabethan elite created settings which reflected their rank, taste and sophisticated use of symbolism. Lee’s landscape incorporated two deserted medieval hamlets between which he created a garden and park with carefully planned vistas. “There is a clear contrast between the controlled man-made formal gardens and the ostensibly ‘natural’ designed landscape lying east of the house,” Everson says.

The eastern and western façades of the house may have been designed to reflect this contrast. The overall design of Quarrendon “might embody the spirit of the Elizabethan settlement and play as a contrast between the old and the new in religious terms”.

Quarrendon has been afflicted by agricultural damage, fly-tipping and looting of masonry from the church ruins. The expansion of Aylesbury presented a new threat. Luckily, local concern has meant that the county council has established a trust to conserve and manage this Elizabethan cultural landscape.

Current Archaeology 218: 14-21, 31-35.