gems, jade, Mesoamerica, early art, Maya, Olmec, Aztec

Green-stone “tiger” masks and the New World’s first precious jade of Burma quality were among the outstanding discoveries of the fifth expedition to southern Mexico jointly sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic Society. In the third exploration of ancient, buried La Venta, our shovels laid bare two room-size mosaic floors tiled with polished green stone to resemble a jaguar’s face. Nothing like them, so far as we know, has been brought to light outside La Venta. Newcomers to La Venta this year were Dr. Waldo Wedel, my fellow archeologist, and Walter A. Weber, ornithologist and artist, both from the Smithsonian Institution, and Miguel Baltazar, our Mexican assistant. They got a nice introduction to native living on dirt floors when our beds and mosquito nets burned in a warehouse fire. An old hand around the place was Richard H. Stewart, National Geographic Society staff photographer, whose camera illustrated previous accounts of La Venta. Our local counselor was again Don Sebastián Torres, 86-year-old patriarch of a small clan speaking Aztec among themselves and Spanish to us. He saved us a tedious week of constructing headquarters by having kinsmen vacate two thatched houses for lease to the expedition.