gems, jade, jadeite, fei cui, Guatemala, Mesoamerica, Maya, Mayan jade, Mexico, history, Costa Rica, Honduras

One of the most prized materials in Pre-Columbian America was jade. The term jade refers not to a single mineral but to a number of colored stones. Jade has a long history of use and is best known among the ancient peoples of Mexico, Central America, and China. At the time of Spanish contact with the New World, several kinds of jade were distinguished, and a summary of early references has been published by William F. Foshag. Mineralogically, jade consists of two principal minerals, nephrite and jadeite. Nephrite, the amphibole variety of jade, is a calcium magnesium silicate of widespread occurrence. Although tremolite and actinolite are known to occur in Mesoamerica, the presence of nephrite has not been demonstrated. The rarer variety of jade is jadeite; it and its mafic isomorph, chloromelanite, belong to the pyroxene group of minerals. Among the ancient Maya inhabitants of southern Mexico, Yucatán, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, jadeite was subject to great artistic elaboration. While other stones such as albite, chloromelanite, glaucophane, and serpentine were also used, the highest artistic development was reserved for jadeite. Documentary sources and the frequency of jadeite occurrence in burials and tombs indicate that jadeite was a “status” material which, at least by Late Classic times (A.D. 600–900), was concentrated in the hands of an elite stratum of Maya society. Today there is only one known source of jadeite in the Maya area—the Motagua River valley of Guatemala. Given the number and widespread distribution of jadeite artifacts, direct evidence for extensive Pre-Columbian exploitation of that source is surprisingly scant. Demonstrating whether or not the Motagua region was the source of the jadeite found throughout the Maya area would provide valuable data for investigations of raw-material procurement and long-distance trade. We have largely completed a multiyear investigation of jadeite that attempted to establish the characteristic properties of the Motagua source material and to ascertain its relationship to jadeite artifacts from selected archaeological sites throughout the Maya zone. To place Maya jadeite in broader perspective, more limited analyses of jadeite and related minerals from Costa Rica—another region renowned for its jade carving—have also been carried out. Characterization was achieved through determination of elemental composition by neutron activation analysis, coupled with identification of mineralogical components by means of x-ray diffraction and petrographic thin-section examination.