gems, jade, pyroxene jade, fei cui, Guatemala, Mesoamerica, Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, archaeogemology, Mesoamerican art

Objects representative of pre-Hispanic traditions collected during or shortly after the Spanish conquest of Mexico are of obvious and significant importance for any study of the aesthetics and art history of the Late Postclassic period, because they include artifact types, examples of techniques and styles insufficiently or not at all preserved in archaeological contexts. At the same time, their identification, documentation and evaluation are made difficult by a number of factors: (1) At the time of their collecting, these objects were removed from their indigenous cultural context without adequate attention to their relationship to other aspects of culture. In this respect they differ from objects obtained from controlled archaeological excavations, which retain at least some stratigraphic association. The problems encountered in their interpretation resemble those of “looted objects” (which, indeed, they are). (2) Records of their transfer from the “field” to Europe, and later within the network of European Kunstkammer-type collections, remain incompletely known, if they are available at all. Museum curators, especially those trained as anthropologists, who may have the expertise necessary to interpret the written information contained in early documents, generally have to depend for the identification of such records upon archivists, who generally do not have the background to recognize their relevance. (3) Genuine scholarly interest in the meaning of these works had its origin in the late nineteenth century, at a time when knowledge of both pre-Cortesian cultures and Kunstkammer-type collections was still rudimentary. Conclusions reached during this pioneer stage of investigations have tended to become accepted as fact, although at least some of them should rather be regarded as part of the mythology of Mexicanist studies. The proliferation of such misguided notions in the secondary literature has made them almost impervious to critical reassessment. In addition, most of the basic studies (as well as many of their sources) have been published in German, which has not been helpful in bringing the results to the attention of Anglophone and Hispanic professional audiences.