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

Serious collecting of Pre-Columbian art on primarily aesthetic grounds began shortly after the First World War; a key role in the new perception of this genre was played by sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi, Jacob Epstein, and Henry Moore, and by the painters of the School of Paris, who taught the museum and collecting world that all kinds of non-Western, non-Oriental traditions had deep artistic value. By 1918, the pioneer art historian Roger Fry was able to say about Pre-Columbian objects, “We have begun to look at them seriously as works of art.” For the first time since that moment in 1520, when Albrecht Dürer had been overwhelmed by the beauty of the wonderful things sent by Cortés from Mexico to the Habsburg court, artefacts from the indigenous civilizations of the New World were treated as something more than anthropological curiosities. An art market sprang up in the first half of this century to satisfy the growing demand by discerning collectors and the general public for this new and exotic material. This is a subject on which very little has been published, and for an investigator it is largely untrodden territory. Of course, there are dangers lying here for the unwary explorer, above all the temptation to go beyond the facts to make retrospective judgments on activities that took place in a climate of opinion radically different from that prevailing today. I do not intend to make such judgments here. Instead, I propose that we examine museums and private collections in the same way that archaeologists look at the remains of the past: as assemblages of artefacts positioned in determined physical spaces. Archaeological questions can be asked about these artefacts: what is their origin, who made them and when? How did they get into the site? How are they distributed there? And what happens to them once they are deposited? For our purposes, perhaps the most significant question would be what kind of socio-economic system has operated to bring such objects from their place of origin to the site (be it a museum or be it a private dwelling)?