Carnelian Necklace

The beads appear to have some age but I guess not terribly old. Not sure of the spacers, bone, coral..?

 

The bones are vertebrae from some animal.

 

The beads are orange agate. Carnelian/cornelian is a solid color.

 

Hard to say.

Carnelian is the red, orange, or amber variety of Chalcedony. Though often a solid color, it may also be banded, in which case it would be jointly classified as both Agate and Carnelian.

https://m.minerals.net/gemstone/carnelian_gemstone.aspx

 

Agate is really a word for certain formations of chalcedony. It is not a separate mineral. My gem book says natural carnelian has a cloudy distribution of color, that banded specimens are very often the near colorless banded agate from South America that has been dyed. The carnelian that is considered highest quality has a natural solid, even rich color. Less flawless material is also regarded as carnelian. Dying is so routine it is usually not even mentioned. As long as it is chalcedony & any shade of orange, even if it is whitish or colorless in some areas, it gets labeled carnelian.

 

What book do you have? It's like going down a rabbit hole to Wonder Land.Is the stone carnelian,carnelian agate,sard,sard onyx,it's a matter of opinion.Then there is a lot of "naturally" heat treated material with pieces the color as your post and then going to deep orange/red from the same 60 foot diameter pit. some examples of Oregon carnelian.... https://www.google.com/search?q=oregon+carnelian&tbm=isch&chips=qregon+carnelian,g_1:raw:ngQfsSICSNA=&client=firefox-b-1-d&hl=en-US&ved=2ahUKEwjHqrv4_LvpAhXFsFMKHUF9B2cQ4lYoAnoECAEQFw&biw=1252&bih=721

 

I have Walter Schurmann, Gemstones of the World, translated from the German, 1977. I have a couple of others, but they seem to draw heavily on Schurmann & are more about pretty pictures than informative text. It's Schurmann I keep within arm's reach. I suppose because he was German, he gives extensive space to agate, the mining & stone cutting at Idar-Oberstein, including lagenstein, layer stone, & the making of cameos.

The confusion of all these terms drives me nuts in the glyptics literature because they have been used so inconsistently. In recent years some books have come out documenting individual private collections of engraved gems that are beautifully photographed & that do take more care about the terminology used for the stones & try to regularize it.

When the author got a last minute opportunity to add my previously unknown Leda & the Swan to her paper on Teresa Talani, she asked me how to describe it in the list appended at the end of all the Talanis she had been able to find. I had a draft of the paper, so could see that other cameos had been described by their owners variously as hardstone, banded agate, or just agate, or chalcedony, or sardonyx. Any one of them would have been correct, with 'hardstone' being the least specific & sardonyx the most. (Of the handful of Talani cameos I have seen, all are sardonyx.) Sardonyx (white & dark brown) is one color scheme of banded agate, one type of agate, all of which are formations of chalcedony, which is one kind of microcrystalline quartz, one form of quartz. Chalcedony & the other microcrystalline quartz, jasper, are what is usually meant by the term hardstone (pietra dura.)

I tried to tackle some of this here (it needs work):

https://cameotimes.com/index.php/reference/materials-guide?start=2