gems, jade, pyroxene jade, fei cui, Guatemala, Mesoamerica, Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, archaeogemology, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Maya, Mayan, Olmec, Aztec, sculpture

As far as I can determine, Robert Woods Bliss (Fig. 1) was the earliest of the serious collectors of Pre-Columbian art. In 1945, he wrote to the secretary of his Harvard class: “About forty years ago [closer to thirty years, in fact] I became interested in the sculpture and artefacts in general of the various pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico, Central America, and the west coast of South America. At that time few, if any, of our art museums had on display these objects, which were only made available to the public in museums of natural history as part of their archaeological finds. To me, many of the pieces I saw had artistic significance and also revealed remarkable craftsmanship. So I began to collect, buying only pieces which appealed to me as objects of art … I began to try to impress upon others the importance of the history of art, of the stylized and powerful sculpture of the early inhabitants of the western hemisphere. … Today many art museums throughout the country have fine displays of pre-Columbian art” (In Whitehill 1967: 90). In an obituary of Mr. Bliss, Samuel Lothrop wrote that: “The primary effect of the Bliss collection has been a wider acceptance of aboriginal American artefacts as art” (Lothrop 1963: 92).