Archeology: Scientists discover the long-lost source of Mayan jade artifacts in Guatemala.
The unlikely combination of a 1998 hurricane, Guatemalan mineral collectors and a chance encounter in an Antigua jewelry store has provided the solution to a mystery that has puzzled archeologists for at least 200 years: Where did the artisans of the Olmec empire obtain their fabulous trove of translucent blue jade?
Scientific expeditions and treasure hunters, known informally among themselves as jadeistas or jade-raiders, have scoured Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Costa Rica searching for the source of the rare stone. They found plenty of the green jade favored by the later Maya, but no blue.
But a U.S. team says that it has now found the fabled jade supply in a Rhode Island-sized area of central Guatemala centered on the Motagua River. High in the Sierra de las Minas, the team found massive veins of high-quality blue streaks 6 feet wide and 150 feet long in the wilderness, and bus-sized boulders of jewelry-quality stone.
The site is marked by a long-hidden road that presumably served the early miners, and virtually everywhere the team looked, they found traces of mining activity, said geophysicist Russell Seitz of Boston. There are also extensive quantities of jade in green and other colors, including white, red, brown, orange and black.
“The variety encompasses most, if not all, of the types so far seen in pre-Columbian America,” he added.
“We were thunderstruck,” said geologist George E. Harlow of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
The discovery indicates that the Olmec, whose empire was centered primarily in the eastern Mexico lowlands, spread their influence much farther inland than had previously been believed, according to archeologist Karl A. Taube of UC Riverside, who participated in the expedition. Even if they did not mine the jade themselves, they must have carried out extensive trade with whoever did, he noted.
“The trade routes must have been much more extensive than we thought,” he said.
Jade, both blue and green, was an extremely valuable commodity in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, more valuable even than gold. It was mined and sculpted from as early as 1500 BC until the Spanish conquest 3,000 years later.
The blue jade, formed in the fiery bowels of the Earth, was particularly valued by the Olmec, who dominated the region from 1100 BC to 500 BC. Artisans fashioned the stone, prized for its color and translucence, into figurines, masks and jewelry that became the hallmarks of the first complex culture of Central America.
“It was their major trading material and a way of storing wealth,” Taube said.
The blue jade was not only economically valuable but also key to the Olmec’s religious practices as a symbol of life itself. “It’s quite common to see human figures with jade beads floating in front of their face to indicate their life force,” he said.
The Spaniards who decimated Mesoamerican populations were more interested in gold, and the skills associated with mining and sculpting jade were largely lost.
But the source of blue jade was probably lost even earlier, Seitz said. Archeological studies of the first-millennium Maya often reveal Olmec blue-jade artifacts that have been dug up and defaced to make new objects. In effect, “They took written plaques and chopped them down into costume jewelry,” Seitz said.
Those discoveries suggest that blue jade was “a valuable material whose source had been lost but that was still valuable and still traded,” he said.
Some experts thought that perhaps the blue jade sources had simply been exhausted. Others felt that the mines might have been buried by the eruption of a volcano. Whatever happened, the location of the mines was lost for hundreds of years.
But not for lack of trying. The 19th century German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt made a special trip to Central America looking for the source of the jade Olmec artifacts that had made their way to Europe. He didn’t find it. He was followed by a variety of other jade-raiders.
Most recently, a variety of American expeditions, many led by Seitz under the auspices of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, had searched for the mines with equally negative results.
Los Angeles author Jerry E. Pournelle recalls participating in one such trip to Guatemala with Seitz. “Scientifically, it’s interesting because nobody knows where the Olmecs got their great big blue jade heads. How did they transport them, how do you move something that big?
“We were looking all over in Guatemala. It was a colorful adventure, but we didn’t find anything.”
The situation changed when Hurricane Mitch turned into a tropical storm as it swept through Central America in October 1998, devastating Honduras and Guatemala. The most powerful storm from the Atlantic in 200 years, Mitch killed more than 11,000 people.
But it also, apparently, uncovered the jade deposits that had previously been hidden and sent large jade boulders tumbling into the Rio Motagua and Rio Blanco. Eventually, mineral collectors began bringing this material into jewelry shops as far away as Antigua, where Seitz stumbled upon some on a 1999 Caribbean vacation with his fiancee.
“They had a whole pile of it on the roof,” he said. “I went up to it and said, ‘Lordy, this is Olmec type.’”
On a series of return trips to Guatemala, Seitz began tracking down the sources of the stones. Accompanied by Harlow, Taube and geologist Virginia B. Sisson of Rice University, Seitz was ultimately led to most of the sites by locals who had been collecting and selling the stones.
“We were getting geological information the old-fashioned way: buying it,” he said.
The first site he found was a two-day hike from the Rio Motagua to an elevation of 6,000 feet. On the shallow back slope of the mountains, “there were great hunks of blue-green, rather attractive jade lying all over the place,” Seitz said. “It was spectacular. There were thousands of tons, just lying around.”
In April of last year, Isauro Meccinos of San Diego, Guatemala, brought Seitz a “jade cobblestone that was the color of aquamarine and that, when cut to a thickness of 6 millimeters, was transparent enough to read through. It was a real super-grade stone. He said it was from a site that was 12 hours away by horse.”
At the site, Seitz concluded he had found the mother lode of pre-Columbian jade. “This was where the really good stuff came from.”
The team published a short article in the journal Antiquity in January describing their finding. They have been careful not to reveal its precise location, however, until measures can be taken to protect the site.
“We would like to get in there and do a more thorough job of studying the sites before miners begin exploiting the material,” Taube said. “So far, we’ve just been focused on finding the rock sources. Now we need to get in there and do the archeology.”
