Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  On August 25, 1979, at the age of seventy-three, Alberto Ruz died of a heart attack while attending a scientific conference in Montreal. Despite all the accomplishments and acclaim, he’d considered his work far from finished: Among his effects, his wife, Celia, found in his wallet a little pack of cards where he’d jotted notes for four more books he’d planned to write about the Maya. Like Pakal, Ruz was buried at Palenque, his marker’s stone top tracing the same gentle curve as the mansard roof on the Temple of the Inscriptions.

  Today, the great majority of Palenque still waits to be excavated, meaning that most of what we know of the city comes from deciphered texts, not physical evidence. Pakal’s sarcophagus still rests under the Temple of the Inscriptions; though the tomb was once open to tourists, it’s been resealed for its own protection. No longer the most studied of Maya sites, Palenque continues to be one of the most popular, drawing millions of visitors each year with its elegant architecture and lush hillside setting.

  Alberto Ruz cleans one of the exquisite stucco heads he discovered in Pakal’s tomb.

  As for the children of Pakal, resisting the carnage and cultural annihilation of the Spanish Conquest, they were still contesting their subjugation centuries later, when Edward H. Thompson arrived in the Yucatan. And even in the late 1900s, they continued to challenge the heirs of Spanish authority, with an uprising in the Mexican state of Chiapas and a brutal civil war in neighboring Guatemala. Today, the Maya number in the several millions, speaking nearly thirty languages, still occupying the land of their ancestors.

  Before their writing was decoded, the prevailing view of the ancient Maya, advanced by scholars such as J. Eric Thompson, was of a preternaturally peace-loving, docile people content to spend their time gazing at the heavens. It was only after we could read their own words that the Maya were revealed in all their complexity, including their penchant for torturing and sacrificing captives taken in warfare. And so, over the course of just a few decades, a people emerged from the shadows and into the glare of history.

  In the years after Alberto Ruz left Palenque, archaeologists continued to find other astounding Maya burials—and more fantastic jades. In 1962, at Tikal, Aubrey Trik of the University of Pennsylvania discovered the tomb of Jasaw Chan K’awiil I, who had been laid to rest in A.D. 734 with an astonishing hoard of jades and other stones, including a headband of emerald-green squares, an exquisite cylindrical mosaic jar with his likeness carved on the lid, a fierce life-size mosaic mask surmounted by a cross-shaped headdress, and the same enormous jade necklace seen in portraits of the ruler, some of the beads the size of small apples. Displayed in the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología in Guatemala City, the hoard is enough to make a visitor gasp.

  In 1965, Nicholas Hellmuth, aged just twenty and still an undergraduate at Harvard, discovered the Tomb of the Jade Jaguar, also at Tikal. Richer with jade than any other Maya burial site except for those of Pakal or Jasaw Chan K’awiil I, the grave included a carved jaguar, another mosaic-covered jar with the king’s portrait on the lid, and a treasure in jade jewelry, including a headband, necklace, pendant, bracelets, and ear ornaments. It is still not certain whose body lay in the tomb, but it’s been suggested that it was Yik’in Chan K’awiil, son of Jasaw Chan K’awiil I.

  In 1994, at Palenque, Arnoldo González Cruz uncovered the Tomb of the Red Queen, so-called for the rich dusting of cinnabar both outside and inside the sarcophagus. Located beside the tomb of Pakal, the burial was the most lavish at Palenque except for that of Pakal himself—with more than a thousand carvings of jade, other stone, and shell, including necklaces; ear ornaments; bracelets; anklets; a headdress of flat, circular stones; and a mask carved from the green mineral malachite. It remains unknown who the Red Queen was, but it’s been suggested that she may have been Pakal’s wife.

  The grave of Jasaw Chan K’awiil I, as reproduced in the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología in Guatemala City.

  Photograph by the author

  And in 1995, a team of archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania, led by Robert Sharer and David Sedat, discovered at Copan the tomb of Yax K’uk’ Mo, the founder of that city’s royal dynasty, who died about A.D. 435. The king’s teeth had been inlaid with jade, a jade carved to resemble a woven mat had been placed in his mouth, and arrayed about him was a treasure in stone, including a large chest plate, shell-and-jade ear ornaments, and the headdress of a warrior king.

  Yet, even as the discoveries continued, crucial gaps remained in the Maya narrative. From the goods found in their rulers’ graves, it was clear that they relied on extensive trade routes to secure exotic commodities such as jade. And given jade’s preeminent financial and spiritual value, any city that could control the stone’s mining or dominate its trade would exert significant advantage over its contentious neighbors.

  Indeed, it seemed plausible that some of the Maya’s many wars were waged over competition for this commerce. But until the source of the jade could be discovered, it was impossible to trace those channels back to their origin, and archaeologists and historians were forced to speculate. Was a particular city located to guard a strategic jade route? Was such-and-such an alliance formed to exchange jade or to end a rival’s hegemony in the stone? Could the endemic wars that played a role in the downfall of the Maya Classic cities have been fought at least in part over access to jade?

  It was as if, a thousand years from now, the sources of the world’s oil were lost to history. From the detritus we’d left behind, archaeologists would quickly conclude that petroleum was essential to our economy. Surely, it was a commodity for which states would pay dearly, perhaps go to war to protect. But with no knowledge of where it had been drilled, how would they explain the superpowers’ intense interest in the Middle East in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or the support that democratic nations lent to right-wing dictators in that region? Only when the area’s oil reserves were revealed would the picture snap into focus for these future scientists. That was the position of Alberto Ruz and other Mayanists when Pakal’s tomb was uncovered at Palenque: Clearly, jade was a strategic resource for the Maya, one they would go to great, perhaps violent, means to procure. But the missing piece—where it had come from—had yet to fall into place. And until it did, there were many aspects of Maya history that would remain unknowable.

  About the time that Alberto Ruz was making his spectacular find at Palenque, an American was probing the volcanic highlands a few hundred miles to the southeast, in Guatemala. Like Ruz and his colleagues, he was tantalized by the prospect of finding jade. But he wasn’t an archaeologist, and the jade he was searching for hadn’t been worked into images of gods or inlaid in funeral masks. It hadn’t even been dug out of the ground.

  William Frederick Foshag had been a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C., since 1919. Born in Sag Harbor, on Long Island, he’d become fascinated by geology after a neighbor had given him the run of his mineralogy library. Later, after his family had moved to California, he’d earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. At the Smithsonian, he was known for opening his office one afternoon a week, so Boy Scouts and other rock hounds could lug in their mineral collections for his expert opinion.

  William Foshag in Mexico in the 1940s, when he was studying the eruption of the volcano Paricutín.

  Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, Image No. 2009, 1508

  In the 1920s, Foshag undertook a mineralogical study for the Mexican government, co-sponsored by the Smithsonian and Harvard. He spent much of the next three decades traveling that country, and in 1943, in a cornfield in the state of Michoacán, he witnessed the spectacular birth of Paricutín, the only volcano whose formation was observed by scientists from conception. Starting as an opening in the earth, the volcano rose fifty feet in the first week and more than eleven hundred feet over the n
ext year, swallowing two villages in black lava. The eruption didn’t quit until 1952, and even after that, Foshag continued to study the volcano, hiring locals to take detailed readings of its activity.

  Matthew Stirling, Foshag’s crosstown colleague at the National Geographic Society, would call on him for mineralogical analyses of pieces he’d uncovered on digs, and out of that exposure and his own extensive work in Mexico, Foshag developed a curiosity about pre-Columbian peoples. Besides his mineral specimens, he’d bring back archaeological artifacts to add to the Smithsonian’s collection. And his interest was especially keen in the nexus where geology met archaeology—in a word, jade. In 1949, the Guatemalan Instituto de Antropología e Historia commissioned him to do a mineralogical survey of pre-Columbian jades, which was published in 1954. In the monograph, Foshag recapped the history of the stone, from its ancient carving in China, to the various names the Aztecs gave it, to the techniques that the pre-Hispanic carvers had used to work it.

  As you’d expect from someone of his training, Foshag also summarized everything known on the geology of jadeite. The mineral is a silicate, meaning that each molecule becomes a silicate ion—an atom of silicon bonded to four of oxygen. Silicon is among the most abundant elements on earth, and silicates make up the majority of the planet’s crust. The most common silicate—and the most common mineral in the world—is quartz, which, though not as dense as jadeite, is at least as hard; some of quartz’s colored forms, such as amethyst, are also used as gemstones. All silicate ions are pyramid shaped, with four triangular faces (including the base), but they come in many different varieties, according to how the individual ions are joined together. Quartz is a tectosilicate, which means its ions bond in a structure resembling the skeleton of a skyscraper. Other silicates form rings, sheets, and hourglasses; garnet and topaz are island silicates, meaning their ions don’t bond at all.

  In jadeite, the silicate ions join together in long chains. Besides silicon and oxygen, the molecule contains sodium and aluminum, yielding a chemical formula of NaAlSi2O6. As Foshag pointed out, jadeite is not often found in its pure form but usually incorporates other minerals such as diopside and acmite. And many minerals and rocks resemble it—actinolite, albite, beryl, chlorite, glaucophane, jasper, metadiorite, amazon stone, muscovite, soapstone, turquoise, and a fellow silicate called serpentine. This last was of particular interest to Foshag. Like jadeite, serpentine is found in a wide range of colors, from black to yellow to green, though it isn’t nearly as hard as jadeite, measuring just 2.5 to 5.0 on the Mohs scale (as opposed to jadeite’s 6.5 to 7.0).

  In the paper, Foshag also reviewed some tantalizing discoveries of ancient workshops where jade had once been fashioned into items such as beads, pendants, ear ornaments, and mosaics. Found in the 1940s, the sites ranged from the ruins at Uaxactun, in northern Guatemala; to the village of San Augustín Acasaguastlán in the Motagua Valley, northeast of Guatemala City; to the great city-state of Kaminaljuyu, in the western part of the present-day capital. At this last location, a jadeite boulder was also found bearing ancient saw cuts and weighing more than two hundred pounds. But, like so many before him, Foshag lamented, “Jadeite has not been found in place in Guatemala or in other parts of Mesoamerica.”

  Poring over geological surveys, Foshag noticed that in Burma, the world’s principal source of jadeite, it was always found with serpentinite, presumably because the rocks were formed together. “Any Mesoamerican location of serpentinite,” he concluded, “is a possible source of jadeite.” (Serpentine is the name of a mineral, which is a solid formed through geological activity that has a particular chemical composition and structure; serpentinite is the name of a rock, that is, an amalgam of more than one mineral that contains almost exclusively serpentine. By the same token, jadeite is the name of the mineral, whereas a jadeite rock, that is, one consisting almost exclusively of jadeite, is technically a jadeitite; in this book, I’ll generally refer to jadeitites as either jadeite rocks or just jade. Except in technical discussions, I’ll use rock and stone as synonyms.)

  If jade were found with serpentinite in Asia, Foshag figured, it should be found with serpentinite in the Americas as well. When he investigated a small area of serpentinite in the Mexican state of Puebla, he found no jade. But in the 1930s, a German naturalist named Karl Sapper had reported large deposits of serpentinite in central Guatemala, northeast of Guatemala City, in the Sierra de las Minas, the mountains forming the northern border of the Motagua River Valley. And jade boulders and pebbles had been found nearby in the ancient Maya city of Quirigua. The Sierra de las Minas, Foshag concluded, was the place to hunt for jade.

  By the 1950s, Foshag was head curator of geology at the Smithsonian and one of the country’s foremost gem experts. In Guatemala, he befriended American archaeologist Edwin Shook, director of the excavations at Tikal (and codiscoverer of the jadeite boulder at Kaminaljuyu), who had also been searching for deposits of jade. Shook introduced Foshag to a young American named Robert Leslie, an organic chemist who was running an agricultural project in the Motagua Valley. A self-described rock hound, Leslie liked to spend his free time scouting the foothills of the Sierra de las Minas for specimens to add to his collection.

  One day in 1952, Leslie was working at Finca Trujillo, on the north bank of the Motagua between the towns of San Cristóbal Acasaguas and Cuijo, about sixty miles northeast of Guatemala City. He was riding his tractor through a tomato field, when a boulder became caught in the cultivator he was towing. Climbing down from his seat, he saw that the dirt-encrusted stone was nearly a foot across. He worked it free and tossed it out of the way, then climbed on his tractor and went back to work.

  But later that night, lying in bed, he thought about the boulder again, how exceptionally heavy it seemed for its size. The next morning, he returned to the tomato field and found it. When he washed off the dirt, he could see that the stone had been fractured around the edges a long time before, as though pieces had been deliberately chipped off. The color, grain, and texture seemed familiar—like the jade boulder from Kaminaljuyu, which he’d seen in the archaeological museum in Guatemala City. He was certain the rock was jade. True, it was a relatively small specimen and could have been carried from anywhere—perhaps even over that putative overseas trade route from Asia. But encouraged, Leslie kept looking.

  Not long afterward, a little more than a mile west of Finca Trujillo, on a natural terrace above the Motagua River, Leslie came across a site with a small mound, which had previously been reported by the prominent American archaeologist A. V. Kidder. In the space of just a few minutes, Leslie picked up more than thirty chips of jade and quartz, along with an unfinished jade bead. Intriguing, but not the first such workshop to be discovered in Guatemala—and hardly anything that would qualify as the lost jade mines of the Maya.

  Leslie gave some of the fragments to Kidder, who passed them to Foshag at the Smithsonian. Foshag tested the samples and found that some were similar to ancient carved jades from Guatemala. He wrote to Leslie, encouraging him to keep searching. “The usual occurrence of jadeite with veins of albite suggests that you obtained these specimens from an area very likely to contain larger and purer masses of jade,” he told him. “I would guess that within a few feet or yards of where you collected your specimens there are richer masses of jade. . . . I am at present occupied on a report on the archeological jades of Guatemala and would be interested in learning more about the occurrence that you have found. While it is, perhaps, not of great mineralogical importance, it is extremely interesting from an archeological point of view, since the source of the archeological jades is unknown.”

  Leslie didn’t discover any “purer” or “richer” jade at the site, but eventually, his search brought him to the nearby village of Manzanal. He followed the main trail north out of town. Then, half a mile into the dry hills, he stopped. On the right side of the path was a four-hundred-square-foot exposed rock formation, or out
crop, of “jadelike material.” On the ground was a deeply weathered rock about the size of a fist, with angular cuts on all sides, as well as fragments of stone of a “pleasing but not very rich” green. Leslie sent them to Kidder, and Kidder forwarded them to Foshag, who pronounced the samples “entirely similar” to jades found in the archaeological sites of the Maya and other ancient Mesoamericans. From the shapes of the fragments, Foshag guessed they were scraps from the manufacture of ear ornaments, beads, and statuettes.

  Foshag coached Leslie to look for serpentinite and sent him a geological map showing deposits of that rock in Guatemala. “I would be very much interested in seeing anything that resembles jade that you might find in your field trips,” he wrote. “It would certainly be quite a discovery if you would find the green jade in its natural habitat.”

  The next month, Leslie sent off to the Smithsonian two pieces he’d dug from the outcrop itself. One was albitite, Foshag determined, but the other was almost pure jadeite. “It looks like you have one of the original sources of Mayan jade and the information should be recorded” in a scientific journal, he wrote. “If you should return to the locality sometime it would be important to search for further evidence of work by the early people.”