gems, jade, jadeite, fei cui, Mesoamerica, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Mayans, Olmecs, Aztecs, archaeology, history, archaeogemology, Pre-Columbian jade; Costa Rica; Maya; exchange; iconography, lapidary

This paper follows the trails of Amerindian stone axes in the course of the 18th century. First, I focus on their relevance in refuting an age-old classification of European stone axes as “jeux de la nature/ jokes of nature” – meaning that, their capricious or suggestive forms notwithstanding, they had been believed to have formed “naturally”, without human intervention. Once it was established that the stone axes dug out across Europe were artefacts, scholarly material, specifically about the kinds of minerals that afforded a range of uses. Stone axes thus moved in a conceptually and taxonomically fluid space, between naturalia and artificialia, sometimes more stone, other times more axe, where the artefact raised questions about the mineral, and the mineral posed questions about the technical, and moral, capacities of the people who produced the artefact. These kinds of crossovers between fields of knowledge point to the geological and mineralogical underpinnings of anthropology and archaeology as disciplines.