Posted on 06/20/2006 2:34:22 PM PDT by blam
Jade find in Antigua produces links to Central America
Tuesday June 20 2006
A discovery of ancient jade could shake up old notions of the New World before Columbus. Scientists say they have traced 1,500-year-old axe blades found in the eastern Caribbean to ancient jade mines in Central America 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) away, New York’s American Museum of Natural History announced late last month.
The blades were excavated in the late 90s by a Canadian archaeologist on the island of Antigua in the West Indies
But the jade used to make the blades almost certainly came from Maya mines in distant Guatemala says mineralogist George Harlow of the American Museum of Natural History.
The find may call into question a once dominant archaeological picture of the pre-Columbian Caribbean.
Previous theories held that a few big or budding civilizations existed on the mainland of Central America, with only isolated, village-based societies on islands in the Caribbean Sea.
“There has been a closed mind-set that these [ancient] people out here were primitive, but we are learning there was a whole world out here we don’t yet fully know about,” said Reg Murphy, an archaeologist at the Museum of Antigua & Barbuda in St. John’s, Antigua.
Murphy collaborated with Harlow on the research.
Murphy says it’s likely that complex societies not only existed on the islands but also communicated with other cultures in South America along the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers.
“Those rivers [in South America] were highways of exchange that extended around the coast all the way to Guatemala,” he said.
Harlow and Murphy’s research team reported its findings in the April issue of the journal Canadian Mineralogist
The small, triangular jade blades found in Antigua are relics of the Saladoid culture, a society named for its home region along the Orinoco River in modern-day Venezuela.
Known for their elaborate pottery, the Saladoid spread to Caribbean islands as far north as Puerto Rico by 500 B.C.
Archaeologists have excavated jade items in the West Indies before, but the source of the jade has been a puzzle, Harlow explains.
No jade deposits are known to exist in the eastern Caribbean. Also, many archaeologists have held that the Saladoid were insulated from the wider world, their travels limited to short canoe trips between islands.
Harlow says the jade used to make the Antigua blades is of a distinct, very hard form called jadeite.
Only a dozen jadeite surface deposits are known in the world, including a vein on the north side of Guatemala’s Motagua River Valley, he adds.
But until recently Guatemalan jade deposits did not match the Antigua jade or other, high-quality forms found in some Maya tombs.
Then came the devastating rains of Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Violent runoff brought chunks of extremely high quality jade careering down the rocky gorges on the south side of the Motagua River.
“As soon as we heard about that, we started looking for its source,” said Harlow, a veteran of previous work in the region.
His team found jadeite there of a quality beyond anything recently mined in Guatemala, he says.
The samples they brought back came just in time to answer questions about the Antigua jade pieces.
Shortly after the new deposits were discovered, Harlow received the Antigua blades, dated from 250 to 500 A.D., from the late University of Calgary Archaeologist Alfred Levinson.
Harlow says he immediately suspected that the axe blades were from the newly confirmed deposits, based on the jade’s unique composition.
He compared the texture of both the Antiguan and Guatemalan jade and measured their ratios of minerals such as mica, albite, omphacite, and quartz.
Harlow found that the newfound deposits and the Antigua pieces bore the same distinctive quartz grains, which are absent from jade mined anywhere else, he says.
“If that [Antigua] stuff is not from Guatemala, the fates are playing some kind of game,” Harlow said.
Among those welcoming the finding is Archaeologist Richard Callaghan of the University of Calgary, who was not part of Harlow’s team.
He says the discovery provides new evidence of long-range trade in the pre-Columbian Caribbean.
Callaghan believes that the civilization was sophisticated enough to maintain organized, long-distance contact with other cultures.
“I think those guys could go by boat straight from Puerto Rico or other islands all the way to [Mexico’s] Yucatán [Peninsula],” he said.
The trade routes were most likely travelled by big, seaworthy canoes, Callaghan says. The culture was replaced by Caribbean peoples collectively called the Taino, whom the Spanish later conquered and all but exterminated.
Murphy, the Antigua curator, shares Callaghan’s expansive view of the Saladoid’s cultural reach.
Murphy hopes the jade-axe findings may spur further study into the origins of other exotic, elaborately carved stones found among Saladoid relics.
For example, he says, some Saladoid artifacts are made of a type of turquoise not known to occur naturally anywhere in the Caribbean.
“It could have come all the way from Chile,” Murphy said.
GGG Ping.
Very interesting.
Jade axes must have been ceremonial in nature?
They probably came before the Crouton period.
This is something that should amaze all of us, Jadeite
is VERY hard stuff, working it reveals a lot about a culture.
Perhaps, as they would have been very labor intensive to make, but they could also have been functional, Jadeite
is hard stuff and can take a pretty sharp edge, if thick
enough it would stand up to fairly hard usage.
Flint of course is much easier to flake to achieve a sharp
edge but I don't know if any deposits were available to
those cultures.
I love Jade, no matter what color it is.
sw
Posted four years ago.
Jadeite (a sodium aluminum silicate) isn't particularly hard -- 6.5 to 7 on the Mohs scale -- but it's extraordinarily tough because of an intergrown fibrous structure. As an illustration glass is harder than steel but it isn't tough at all and shatters easily.
Another mineral, nephrite (a calcium, magnesium, iron silicate), is also called jade. It's a little softer, Mohs 6 to 6.5, but is even tougher than jadeite.
The quartz minerals, which include flint, chalcedony, crystalline quartz, jasper, agate, etc., were all used as arrowheads, axes and spear points. They, along with obsidian (volcanic glass), can be fashioned into very sharp edges but none are very tough and all break very easily.
The use of nephrite and jadeite in tools goes back to prehistory. Jade was used for both utilitarian and ceremonial objects and became known as the "axe stone" by cultures around the world. It's rather easily ground to shape and polished by rubbing it against harder stones like quartz but cutting or sectioning it by breakage or sawing can be very difficult. It's likely most axes, etc., were carved from small stream-tumbled boulders.
Not a whole lot is known about ancient lapidary techniques in the New World except that the artisans were very accomplished and capable of many difficult procedures. It's hard not to wonder if some of those procedures were derived from China where the carving of nephrite goes back thousands of years.
[rimshot!]
Exciting find. I have always wondered why it was thought that these people did not trade with each other.
Interesting!
Did they worship a green goddess?
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You have. Thanks.
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