Jade Use in Mesoamerica - Sources in Mesoamerica

Sources in Mesoamerica

The archaeological search for the Mesoamerican jade sources, which were largely lost at the time of the Maya collapse, began in 1799 when Alexander von Humboldt started his geological research in the New World. Von Humboldt sought to determine whether or not Neolithic jadeite celts excavated from European Megalithic archaeological sites like Stonehenge and Carnac shared sources with the similar looking jade celts from Mesoamerica (they do not).

From 1954 to 1996 the only documented source of jadeite in Mesoamerica was the lowland Motagua River valley. Research conducted by the Mesoamerican Jade Project of Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology between 1977 and 2000 led to the identification of both the long lost 'Olmec Blue" mines, a discovery published by Mesoamerican Jade project Field Director Russell Seitz and his colleagues from the American Museum of Natural History in Antiquity in December 2001. They in addition conducted geochemical dating of several ancient Maya lode mines and alluvial sources in the mountainous areas on both sides of the Motagua. Following their exposure by the torrential rains of Hurricane Mitch in 1998, alluvial cobbles of blue jade were traced up a southern Motagua tributary, the Rio Tambor, to massive outcrops of fine grained translucent ' Olmec Blue' jadeite, at elevations of between 1200 and 3800 feet in the province of Jalapa, along a fault extending from Carrizal Grande to La Ceiba. Geochemical dating revealed that the southern deposits, including the archaeologically important translucent blue jade, were ~ 40 MA older that the coarse grained opaque jades mined for sale to tourists, or those from the higher elevations around a northern Motagua tributary, the Rio Blanco, where jadeite outcrops are found at elevations of up to an elevation of 6,000 feet) and several of the ancient mining sites are connected by dry-laid stone paths.

It is noteworthy that the richest 'Olmec Blue' source area, far from being in 'the Motagua Valley' lies about 50 km southwest of Copan. Since the Motagua becomes Guatemala's border with Honduras, Honduras may host alluvial jade as well. The rediscovered 'Olmec' jade is of the quality traded throughout formative Mesoamerica, reaching areas as distant as the Valley of Mexico and Costa Rica. While Pool notes that "for many years, it had been suggested that there might be another source in the Balsas River valley", p. 151 no such Mexican source has come to light; However, recent work has revealed that the high pressure-low temperature metamorphic rocks ( blueschist facies) hosting jade deposits in Guatemala also outcrop as jadeite boulder bearing serpentine melange deposits at several places in Cuba and Hispaniola, where the material was exploited by the Taino and Carib cultures. Jade artifacts, mainly pointed celts, apparently stemming from these Antillean sources have been excavated as far east as Antigua in the Windward Islands. Given the scope and duration of the regional tectonic processes that created and exhumed these jade deposits, they may well extend into Chiapas as well.