Sarah Caldwell Steele

Sarah Caldwell Steele has had a love affair with Whitby jet since the age of seven. Reinforcing 40 years of commercial experience of working jet as a lapidary product, she graduated from Durham with a BSc in Geology in1992. She was awarded Fellowship of the Gemmological Association of Great Britain in 2013, and subsequently Diamond Fellowship in 2015.

Her gemmological prowess lies in the identification of black gem materials including natural and semi-synthetic biopolymers. Sarah is widely considered the world’s leading authority on the jet species of gemstones. In 2019 she returned to Durham University as a PhD candidate. Her multidisciplinary and multiperiod PhD thesis focuses on the gemmological classification, identification and interpretation of black artefacts within the archaeological record, focusing in particularly on the Jet Group.

The project aims to establish a new nomenclature system to decribe jet and jet-like materials and to provide a methodology for the identification of carbonaceous artefacts in the archaeological record drawing on techniques employed by the contemporary indigenous lapidary practitioners of Europe, Asia and the Americas.