It was ultramarine, she would later learn, a pigment that a millennium ago could only have come from lapis lazuli originating ... paint while licking her brush to a point, or she breathed in ...

"I remember joking around at the time that maybe we discovered an artist painting with lapis lazuli." The idea seemed ... to the notion of moistening the brush," says Cynthia Cyrus of Vanderbilt ...

Testing eventually revealed that it was lapis lazuli, and the most likely cause is that the woman worked as an artist, licking her paint brush, or inhaling dust while grinding the expensive ...

who repeatedly licked the tip of brushes that were saturated with lapis lazuli pigments. “B78,” as the anonymous skeleton is known, was unearthed from a cemetery associated with a woman’s ...