gems, jade, pyroxene jade, fei cui, guatemala, Mesoamerica, Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, archaeogemology, Mayan design, aesthetics, Olmec, Aztec, Guatemala, archaeology

Jade objets d’art count among the most wonderful works of art the Maya have left us. The majority of items found date back to the Classic period, but more and more artefacts dating back to the Preclassic are being discovered. The earliest of these include simple, unadorned beads found in burials in Cuello (Belize) dating back to between 1200 and 900 B.C. At this time, stone cutting was already highly developed among the Olmec, who were already working jade before the Maya. In Mesoamerica, jade is found solely as jadeite; nephrite, the other variety known as jade, does not exist there. However, in this area of Mesoamerica “jade” is a collective term for a number of other green or blue stones, such as diopside, chrysoprase, albite, serpentine and combinations of jadeite and diopside. Investigations have shown that some items are not, as previously suspected, made of jadeite, but from some of these other stones that resemble it.