Aztec Focuses On Drilling The Tombstone Silver District In Arizona

VANCOUVER, BC - Aztec Minerals Corp. is focusing this year on drilling the famous Tombstone silver-gold-zinc-lead-copper district located in southeastern Arizona. Aztec holds an option to acquire a 75% interest in the Tombstone property which includes many of the original patented mining claims in the district. Aztec recently completed a 4 line, 7.1 km AMT geophysical survey over the Tombstone property to detect conductive and resistive bodies down to 1,000 m depths, well below the historic underground mines. Management is now conducting a comprehensive review of all exploration data to prioritize targets for the next phase of exploration at Tombstone but it is clear there are two main types of exploration targets:

1) shallow, bulk tonnage, "heap leach"-type, epithermal gold-silver oxide mineralization, and 2) deeper, high grade, "Taylor"-style carbonate replacement silver-lead-zinc-copper-gold deposits (CRD).

CEO, President and Chief Geologist Joey Wilkins said, "Now the silver price is back above $18 per oz, it is a great time to own an historic silver mining district! Aztec has generated several exciting new targets at Tombstone over the past three years through its systematic exploration programs as well as methodical evaluation of historic exploration and production results.

The close proximity and geological similarity of the Tombstone district to the Hermosa silver district 60 kilometers (37 miles) away which hosts the recent "Taylor" discovery prompted us to take a hard look at new geological interpretations for the Tombstone district."

The Tombstone project is located 100 kilometers (km) southeast of Tucson, Arizona and covers much of the historic Tombstone silver district. Tombstone is renowned for its high grade, oxidized, silver-gold-lead-zinc-copper epithermal and CRD mineralization hosted in veins, mantos, pipes and disseminated orebodies that were mined in the late 1800's and early 1900's.

Host rocks to the mineralization were primarily clastic sediments of the Cretaceous Bisbee Formation. Below 200 meters (m) in depth, the Bisbee is underlain by the same Paleozoic limestone formations that host the Taylor zinc-lead-silver deposit located 60 km southwest of Tombstone. Taylor was discovered by Arizona Mining in 2015 and they accepted a takeover bid from South32 Limited in 2018.

Although the historic silver mines at Tombstone were generally small, Aztec believes they could be related to much larger epithermal and CRD orebodies below the old mines. Since 2017, Aztec has completed geological mapping, geochemical sampling and geophysical surveying to identify the most prospective areas for epithermal gold-silver mineralization around and below the Contention open pit, and CRD zinc-lead-copper-silver-gold mineralization below the entire district.