Green earths and other green-producing minerals have most likely been employed since the beginning of time however, finding proof of the use of a pigment in the deep past is difficult due to a number of conditions that eradicate them from the naked eye. Exposure to the elements, human interference, deterioration of the substrate, and more, are effective at making pigments invisible. While many objects could be tested for evidence of mineral pigments, few people are yet doing that kind of testing which is leaving a huge gap in our information about pigment use. So, people like me have to wait to for someone to unearth objects that do have visible pigments on them. like the Coast Salish celadonite (NWC people had a grinding stone, paint dish and brushes for each color so they didn't contaminate their colors) grinding stone found at the 4,000 year level of a Coast Salish midden on a small island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada.

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While the grinding stone came out of the 4,000 yr level, it may be much older, but we at least have a date to work from of approximately 2,000 years BCE. While researching celadonite use by Northwest Coast Indigenous people, and expanding that research to the entire globe and throughout history, I have been able to determine the use of celadonite as a pigment by the Coast Salish people is the earliest known use in the world, predating even Roman use by more than a thousand years.  

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While this speaks to the long history of terra vertes as paint pigments, lately we've seen "new" green pigments (see the gallery below) hit the market, but little is known of their historical use. Of course we have good records of the use of malachite, but what about the more than two dozen other green mineral pigments? I have no doubt that they've all been experimented with by artists throughout history, but the documentation on them is so rare that we don't really know anything about them yet.