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

Walters reports archaeological evidence for a pre-Columbian jade-working workshop at Guaytán, Guatemala, in the middle Motagua Valley, an area closely associated with Mesoamerican jadeite sources. He examines the workshop remains and the successive stages represented by raw material, production debris, partially worked pieces and finished or near-finished jade objects, using them to reconstruct aspects of lapidary production at the site. The evidence establishes Guaytán as an important locus of jade manufacture and contributes to understanding how jade was processed near its source before finished objects entered wider Mesoamerican exchange networks. Later studies of Maya jade production repeatedly cite Walters’s paper as an early archaeological identification of jade-working activity in the Middle Motagua Valley.