Mystery shiny ball

[CRDX]

And I meant hills, not kills, for some reason the forum software on this website (stinks) and prevents me from editing posts.

[painshill]

Hi Christian

As per our exchange of private messages, I would be pretty sure that (as suggested by an earlier poster), you have a "Moqui Marble”. They are frequently claimed as having been used for centuries in native rituals, but there’s nothing apart from anecdotal evidence to support that apart from occasional finds in burial contexts. It’s not however unusual for odd or attractive stones and pebbles to be present as “grave goods” for reasons which we only speculate upon. Although “moqui” translates as “the dead” in the Hopi language, they were named moqui marbles by white folk in modern times as a presumptive reflection of Hopi native traditions concerning ancestor worship and the name has stuck.

They’re completely natural concretions of iron oxides in sandstone and are particularly common in the Navajo Sandstone Formations of Utah and across to the Colorado Plateau, where they’re anything up to 190 million years old. They turn up in smaller numbers in lots of other regions. The matrix is sandstone, cemented by hematite (Fe2O3), and goethite (FeOOH). They won’t normally be magnetic… at least not strongly so. They range in colour from black through to reddish brown depending on how much weathering they have seen and often aren’t completely round. A ‘dimple’ (that also may be a weak spot for weathering) is not an uncommon feature, as seen in this one from my collection:




Some are perfectly smooth and those ones (also known as “Navajo cherries”) generally have a sandstone interior and an iron oxide exterior in two distinct layers.

[CRDX]

Hi again painshill, thank you for your time. Your explanation is sound and it would seem to make alot of sense. That piece you posted looks identical in form to mine. This is my question though, as I said in the first post, these moqui marbles are described as pretty much a Southwest phenomena. Do you have any idea how such a polished one ended up in central Kentucky?

[CRDX]

Oh and can you (or anyone for that matter) provide another example of these being found in the South?

[painshill]

These things can form in any location where there is iron-rich groundwater permeating through sandstone or other sedimentary rocks. They only tend to acquire a colloquial name where they are abundant enough to have a particular association with a given location... as is the case for the Navajo Sandstone and related formations. Otherwise, we just call them ‘concretions’, appended with the nature of their mineralogy. There are similar items found a little further east… such as “Kansas pop-rocks’ for example.

I can’t show you a specific picture of an identical item found in Kentucky, but I think you’re getting too hung up on location.

You only found one. If it was formed in the vicinity where you found it then that suggests they aren’t commonly formed, but doesn’t mean they don’t exist at all. The Borden Formation in south and southeast Kentucky is for example one of several geological series in the state that potentially has suitable conditions for such concretions to form. So too does the Breathitt Formation in eastern Kentucky, which is particularly rich in ironstone. The occasional occurrence of such concretions in unremarkable quantities generally isn’t going to feature much in literature or acquire nicknames in the way that Moqui marbles have.

If it wasn’t formed in Kentucky, it could have been taken there. We would call such examples ‘manuports’. We know that native Americans collected/curated and probably even traded such stones. As I said, they occasionally turn up as grave goods (notably Mississippian culture) but there’s no real evidence for them having any particular functional use beyond being curiosities of a ‘lucky stone’ nature or part of a medicine bundle. You have no context to suggest that and my money would still be on it being a Kentucky item that’s simply not commonly seen but nevertheless not a geological impossibility, nor even particularly unlikely. These are not things which are unique to the Southwest.

Incidentally, the Utah examples are believed to be a terrestrial analogue for similar items observed by NASA’s rover on Mars. Those were dubbed ‘Martian blueberries’, since the uncorrected initial false-colour images gave them a blue colour (they’re actually reddish).

[tomclark]

I think iron oxide concretions/nodules can occur in calcite and coal as well as limestone and sandstone... You definitely have natural concretions of iron oxides/siderite/limonite in Kentucky. We have them in Florida

[Cecilia]

And Georgia.

[CRDX]

These things can form in any location where there is iron-rich groundwater permeating through sandstone or other sedimentary rocks. They only tend to acquire a colloquial name where they are abundant enough to have a particular association with a given location... as is the case for the Navajo Sandstone and related formations. Otherwise, we just call them ‘concretions’, appended with the nature of their mineralogy. There are similar items found a little further east… such as “Kansas pop-rocks’ for example.

I can’t show you a specific picture of an identical item found in Kentucky, but I think you’re getting too hung up on location.

You only found one. If it was formed in the vicinity where you found it then that suggests they aren’t commonly formed, but doesn’t mean they don’t exist at all. The Borden Formation in south and southeast Kentucky is for example one of several geological series in the state that potentially has suitable conditions for such concretions to form. So too does the Breathitt Formation in eastern Kentucky, which is particularly rich in ironstone. The occasional occurrence of such concretions in unremarkable quantities generally isn’t going to feature much in literature or acquire nicknames in the way that Moqui marbles have.

If it wasn’t formed in Kentucky, it could have been taken there. We would call such examples ‘manuports’. We know that native Americans collected/curated and probably even traded such stones. As I said, they occasionally turn up as grave goods (notably Mississippian culture) but there’s no real evidence for them having any particular functional use beyond being curiosities of a ‘lucky stone’ nature or part of a medicine bundle. You have no context to suggest that and my money would still be on it being a Kentucky item that’s simply not commonly seen but nevertheless not a geological impossibility, nor even particularly unlikely. These are not things which are unique to the Southwest.

Incidentally, the Utah examples are believed to be a terrestrial analogue for similar items observed by NASA’s rover on Mars. Those were dubbed ‘Martian blueberries’, since the uncorrected initial false-colour images gave them a blue colour (they’re actually reddish).

Hey there, thanks for taking the time to educate us all. I love learning new information. I'm not too upset over this being natural, I think it's still a cool piece and I'm happy to have found it.

[painshill]

Although not identical to your item, there are some examples of the kinds of things you might find in Kentucky at the link below. I didn't think to do a Google for "Kentucky concretion", but if you persist with variations on that search that for long enough, you will probably find images and descriptions that more closely resemble your item.

https://www.uky.edu/KGS/fossils/fossil-did-i-find-fossil-egg-turtle-shell.php

[CRDX]

You are a treasure to this forum painshill. I don't know what we would do without people like yourself.