Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  But this explanation raised another question. Jade isn’t normally found directly across both sides of a fault like the Motagua (known as a strike-slip fault, meaning that virtually all motion, in the present and the recent past, is horizontal rather than vertical). The jade may be produced on both sides, but because the segments are continually sliding past each other, over time the movement of the fault should separate the deposits by hundreds of miles. That was why, after jade was discovered on the north side of the Motagua, geologists had discouraged prospectors from searching directly to the south.

  In the case of the Motagua Fault, the north side is sliding westward, while the south creeps eastward. So why, after millions of years of such slippage, were the jade deposits found adjacent to each other? It seems that they were actually created far apart, on an unusually long section of the Motagua Fault, when it was a subduction zone rather than the strike-slip fault it is today. So, while the northern jade was forming near the Caribbean, the southern jade was forming closer to the Pacific (for convenience, I’m using present-day references here, although the geography was very different 140 million years ago, when the Caribbean plate was just beginning to form). Then, over many millions of years, the motion of the fault, instead of separating the two deposits, brought them together in a kind of meeting of the mines. So as a result of Los Jaderos’ discovery, the geology of the Motagua has been rewritten, showing it to be more distinctive and more complex than had been thought and providing geologists with years of additional research to better their understanding not just of that region but of tectonic action around the world.

  Los Jaderos’ discovery also bolstered George Harlow’s suggestion that all the Mesoamerican jade had come from the area around the Motagua. One argument against that idea had been that some of the museum jades didn’t match the stone currently mined in that part of Guatemala, implying that the raw material for those pieces had originated elsewhere. George Harlow’s counterargument had been that it was just a matter of looking more diligently—that as more geological sources were discovered, jade would be found that was similar to the problematic artifacts. One kind of archaeological jade with very little corresponding stone from the Motagua had been Olmec blue. But now that Los Jaderos had uncovered a huge deposit of that type, it seemed to support Harlow’s claim that the resources of the Motagua were large and varied enough to eventually account for all the jades in museum collections.

  If Los Jaderos’ sources had been mined in Olmec times, why had the sites been abandoned with untold tons of the precious stone unexploited? Did the quarries fall into disuse when Olmec civilization passed its crest, to be surpassed by the Maya, with their predilection for green jade? Or had the mines been buried by some violent upheaval until Hurricane Mitch exposed them again? Landslides are common in the area, for example. Or maybe the sources were covered in ash from the region’s many volcanoes. Russell Seitz leans toward the latter explanation, telling Archaeology magazine, “The [jade] deposits have been Pompeiied several times.” Even after Hurricane Mitch, deep layers of ash still cover the south side of the fault. It would be a simple matter to date the ash to see whether it fell during the Olmec era, but such a project might be hard to fund, suggests Jadera Virginia Sisson, since it could be considered a novelty area out of the academic mainstream.

  However the deposits came to be hidden, Seitz believes that if the late-arriving Maya had known about the treasure of blue jade buried in the sierra, they would have exploited it. In fact, he makes the radical suggestion that the Maya carved mostly green jade not for cultural reasons, as is generally supposed, but because the Olmecs had already collected the blue jade from streams and accessible veins, the way “the Forty-niners scarfed up all the conspicuous gold nuggets in California’s riverbeds, leaving it to latecomers to go after the slimmer pickings in them there hills.” He believes that, eschewing the undistinguished gray-green stone left in the “many ugly outcrops” around the Motagua, the Maya suffered a shortage of gem-quality jade. “Jade mining dwindled under the Maya,” he claims. “By Aztec times, some mines were already lost.”

  Some scholars find the idea of a Maya jade shortage credible. For example, a lack of raw material could explain why the Maya’s carvings are generally smaller than the Olmecs’ and why the Maya often fashioned their masks as thin mosaics rather than from solid stone—not just to save labor but to conserve a scarce resource. And a shortage of jade could explain why some Maya artifacts were worked in less valuable greenstone.

  Other scholars demur. Huge waste deposits in the Early Classic city of Tikal and the Late Classic city of Cancuen suggest that, at least at some places and some periods during their long history, the Maya had raw jade in abundance. And the Maya may have made mosaic masks not due to a shortage of jade, but because that technique helped artisans in the lowland cities, where the jade-working tradition was less developed, to achieve a greater likeness of their subject. The Olmecs’ larger carvings, similarly, may have resulted not because the Olmecs had more jade than the Maya, but because they wanted to show their stone’s striking transparency to full advantage.

  As for the Maya’s use of less desirable greenstone, it does appear that the pre-Hispanic artisans could tell the difference between jade and similar rocks. Bob Terzuola claims he can generally identify jade on sight, and he can always tell whether a stone is jade once he starts working it. Jade is so distinctive in its appearance, density, and texture that it’s inconceivable to him that the ancient carvers (if perhaps not their patrons) couldn’t also recognize it. And the fact that the Maya’s greatest works were generally reserved for jade show that they could discriminate between that and lesser stone.

  So it may have been that for the Maya, color trumped every other quality. They apparently preferred to carve jade, but when it was unavailable, any green stone was better than blue, no matter how dense and lustrous the latter might be. But if the Maya knowingly carved non-jade greenstone, doesn’t that imply a shortage of the genuine article? Not necessarily. It could just be that certain individuals who wanted jade didn’t have the resources, financial or otherwise, to get it. Of course, this is always the case with high-status goods—if they were too readily available, they’d lose their cachet. Just because today some people buy cubic zirconia doesn’t mean that there’s a worldwide shortage of diamonds, only that for some people, the real thing is out of reach.

  Then, too, if the Maya did suffer a lack of jade, it could have been caused not by a falloff in supply but by an increase in demand, as every Maya king and noble insisted on having his own cache of the ultimate status symbol. Or producers or traders could have withheld stone to create an artificial shortage and manipulate the market. Or warfare or some other disruption in trade routes could have been to blame. None of this necessarily implies a dearth of jade at the source.

  As for Olmec blue, Virginia Sisson doesn’t believe that there was ever a shortage of that type of jade in ancient times, either. Despite the possibility of volcanic eruptions and landslides, the sheer quantity of stone that she and the other Jaderos discovered makes her doubt that the enormous jade field was ever totally buried. So if the Maya had wanted blue jade, she suspects they could have found it. And indeed, as twentieth-century prospectors have demonstrated, there are still millions of tons of jade of all colors in the Motagua that the Maya never availed themselves of. Is it plausible that all these deposits escaped the notice of the ancient prospectors? Or if the Maya knew the jade was there, is it likely they would have thought it “too ugly” to bother with?

  Another argument for a jade shortage is that, even when the Maya did carve genuine jade, the quality of their stone was generally inferior to the Olmecs’, as though the Maya had to content themselves with the dregs that their predecessors had passed over. I often heard people who work with jade arrange the various types into a kind of lapidary pecking order, so that among ancient jades, Olmec was said to be better than Maya, which was
supposedly better than modern jade from Guatemala; among modern jades, Burmese was also judged of higher quality than Guatemalan; and among Guatemalan stone, Los Jaderos’ blue jade was judged better than the green stone generally offered for sale in Antigua. So I started to wonder, what does quality mean in a piece of jade, anyway?

  As I began to canvass archaeologists and geologists, I found that many have trouble pinning down the concept. It’s a cultural term with no objective meaning, they say, an aesthetic decision, a value judgment we make, an overlaying of our cultural preferences on the past. Ron Bishop of the Smithsonian, who has done more scientific analysis of jade than perhaps anyone, tells me he doesn’t know what the word quality refers to—hardness, luster? To him, it’s a term more for gemologists and art historians than for archaeologists.

  George Harlow finds that so-called differences in quality are really matters of individual preference, an aesthetic appraisal about a stone’s color and transparency. That’s not to say that judgment doesn’t have a mineralogical basis. For instance, visible cracks diminish the perceived quality of a piece of jade, as do inclusions (foreign bodies of other minerals). And translucency depends partly on the size of the crystals—the smaller they are, the more translucent the stone appears to the human eye. Purity can also enhance perceived quality, because the more different minerals found in the stone, the more light is diffracted, further reducing translucency. But the crucial word in all of this is perceived: Although it’s a fact that a particular stone has a purity of such-and-such percent or crystals of such-and-such size, it’s the opinion of the beholder that translates that perception into quality.

  In terms of pleasing color and transparency, Harlow admits that Olmec jade could be argued to be of higher quality than most Maya stone. But that doesn’t mean that Olmec stone was universally better. In fact, the Maya had more emerald green jade, he points out, which is generally considered the most desirable type of all. Score a quality point for them. But if you look closely at carved Maya plaques, you can see that they often have an irregular surface, because they’ve been cannily carved to expose a thin vein of bright green set in a less desirable color. So even some of the most spectacular Maya artifacts are less uniform in terms of “quality” than they might appear.

  Olmec pieces are often said to show a higher level of craftsmanship than Maya carvings. Some people find the Olmec workmanship more consistent, and many confess a preference for Olmec jades, which though older, seem more “modern” for their simplicity of form. But on the other hand, Maya figures are carved with more detail and movement. In terms of polish and finish, Bob Terzuola finds that both Olmec and Maya carvings generally range from good to very good. It’s hard for him to decide, as a craftsman, who were the more skilled carvers. The Maya definitely invested more time, creating more, and more complex, objects. But above any differences between the two bodies of work, what impresses Terzuola is their underlying similarity: Both the Maya and the Olmecs could have picked other beautiful stones that would have been infinitely easier to carve, but they chose the most difficult material possible as the medium for their highest art.

  What about the variation in the so-called quality of jade being sold today? Though Burmese jade is often said to be of higher quality than Guatemalan jade (partly because Burma has more emerald green), there is no objective yardstick, George Harlow points out. Though some experts consider that a stone should be at least 90 percent jadeite to be sold as jade, there is no industry standard, and to be considered of gem quality, jade only has to have an appealing color, some transparency, and the strength to withstand carving. And so some unscrupulous merchants, in Guatemala and elsewhere, take advantage of people’s ignorance and pass off what Virginia Sisson calls “junk” to unsuspecting tourists. In other words, some of the jade being sold in Antigua now is good, some not so good.

  Was Maya jade really of higher quality than what is being offered now? It’s true that the Maya had more emerald green than today’s merchants, but as William Foshag reported more than fifty years ago, most of the ancient Maya jade was not emerald green and is comparable to what is being mined in Guatemala presently. And Bob Terzuola reminds us that today’s artisans have an exceptional type of black jade that Terzuola judges as fine a jade as you’ll see anywhere in the world, based on its lack of inclusions; great purity; dense, tight crystals; evenness of color; and its ability to hold “a polish that will take your breath away.” (The term is a misnomer, by the way: Black jade appears to be that shade because of its great depth of color, but if you cut a thin plaque and examine it under a lamp, you’ll see that it’s really very dark green.) And the lion’s share of this fine black jade comes, not from Burma, but from Guatemala.

  In the end, I realize, it’s no simple matter to tease out the meaning of quality in jade, and declaring one piece as “better” than another involves a host of judgments and assumptions. Which makes it hard to argue that the Maya of twelve hundred years ago would have preferred to carve blue jade because of its superior “quality.” So the consensus is still that the Maya had a genuine preference, religious and cultural, for jade that was green—the color of water, of breath, of life itself. And it’s very difficult to conclude that Olmec jade is better than Maya jade, that Maya jade is better than modern jade, or that Los Jaderos’ Olmec blue is better than the green jade being sold in Antigua today. Ultimately, as George Harlow says, such judgments come down to differences in “taste and commerce.”

  Meanwhile, in the years since Los Jaderos’ discovery, research has continued in Guatemala. In February 2004, Karl Taube returned to the Motagua with a team of archaeologists to inaugurate El Proyecto Arqueológico del Jade, an ambitious effort to “document archaeological sites and jadeite sources in the upper Río El Tambor drainage area,” which includes the territory around Los Jaderos’ discovery. In its first season, Taube’s group found seven more sites with the remains of stone buildings and jade workshops. The workshops didn’t surprise them, because jade is so heavy that it was generally reduced to smaller pieces very close to where it was mined. From the shape of the fragments, it appeared that, as at similar sites throughout the Motagua, the stone had been formed into celts, presumably for shipment to cities where it would be rendered into finished items under the direction of Maya nobles.

  Why take the trouble to carve celts instead of just knocking the stone into rough but portable chunks? Taube, who’s written extensively on Olmec and Maya symbols, believes the shape may have been dictated by a combination of practicality and ideology. For one thing, celts served as a more-or-less uniform measure for jade, the way bullion does for gold today. The celts also made it easier to judge the jade, since flaws are more apparent in the smaller, more translucent celts than in an uncut block. And finally, the celts had a ritual significance, especially for the Olmecs, because their shape called to mind the husks of the sacred corn plant, the crop that had made Mesoamerican civilization possible and whose masa, or dough, had even served as the raw material for the mythical creation of mankind.

  Other research is being conducted by the Cancuen Archaeological Project, led by Arthur Demarest of Vanderbilt University. Built at the point in northern Guatemala where the Río La Pasión becomes navigable, the Maya city of Cancuen (“Place of the Serpents”) was a major trading center where goods such as jade, pyrite, and obsidian were gathered from the highlands and transferred to canoes for shipment to the northern lowlands. The city grew wealthy, building a port on the river, an expansive market, and one of the grandest palaces in Mesoamerica. Cancuen reached its zenith in the seventh century A.D., until its nobles were massacred and the city sacked about the year 800, a victim of the violence and unrest around the time of the Maya collapse.

  The ruins at Cancuen were littered with jade fragments, including a thirty-five-pound boulder in the process of being sawed into plaques. But archaeologists discovered that the city’s jade didn’t resemble stone from the Motagua as much as
it did carved artifacts found in the Salamá Valley, northeast of Guatemala City. So they began to wonder whether there might be unreported jade sources in the Salamá. The Ridingers confirmed that they were mining jade in the area, and they furnished samples for testing. Preliminary findings showed that the Salamá stone did resemble the fragments from Cancuen, and now the archaeologists are searching for evidence of trade routes that might have been used to move the jade.

  Meanwhile, fundamental questions remain. The Ridingers believe they have found the lost jade mines of the Maya, just as Los Jaderos think they have discovered the jade mines of the Olmecs. There’s no question that both teams have found jade. But have they found “mines,” and are those sources really Maya or Olmec?

  NINE

  “The Most Mysterious Stone of the World”

  In Antigua, Guatemala, 4:00 a.m. seems even earlier than it does in most places. On this particular morning, the sky is the color of obsidian, and the air is frigid owing to the altitude. During the day, the narrow streets are hemmed by parked cars, but at this hour, the vehicles are all hidden away for safekeeping.

  At 4:20, Mary Lou Ridinger pulls in front of my hotel in her white Ford F-150 pickup, or picop, as they’re known here. We’ve arranged to meet at this hour hoping to slip through the capital before the horrendous morning rush begins. On the outskirts of Antigua, we stop to pick up Raquel Pérez and Vinicio Jérez, the Ridingers’ general manager and production manager. Wearing baseball caps and jackets, they climb into the back seat. We’re headed to the campo to inspect some jade. Though Mary Lou still doesn’t grant anyone access to her mines, she’s agreed to make an exception and let me come along on this trip to meet some of her pickers.