Several years ago, Mary Lou Ridinger traveled to San Antonio, Texas, for an exhibition of artifacts from the Maya ruins at Río Azul, located in northern Guatemala, not far from Tikal. It had been proclaimed Guatemala Month in San Antonio, and archaeologists, the editor of National Geographic, and other dignitaries had flown in for the opening. Among them were the Guatemalan ambassador and his wife—the same woman who years before had assured one of the Ridingers’ first customers that there were no jade deposits in Guatemala. The diplomat and his señora were standing in the receiving line, and as Mary Lou made her way toward them, she saw that the woman was bedecked with jewelry purchased from the Ridingers. When Mary Lou reached her, she thanked her for wearing jade guatemalteco. To which the ambassador’s wife replied, “I wouldn’t wear anything else.”
Though the ancient jade fields have given up some of their secrets, they still guard others. One has to do with the bright, wonderfully translucent stone known as imperial green. A freak of geology, created when a tiny bit of chromium is added to the mix, imperial green was the most coveted of all jade in Maya times, preferred for the greatest works of the wealthiest kings. Today, it remains the most-prized gemstone in the world, breathtakingly rare in Burma and rarer still in Guatemala. Over nearly four decades, the Ridingers have handled hundreds of tons of jade, ranging from blue to black to lavender to dozens of shades of green. But during all that time, they have come across just three small cobbles with veins of imperial jade. Their competitors have fared no better. So where did the Maya obtain this most desirable of all hues—and is more waiting, somewhere, to be discovered?
What bright green jade was to the Maya, translucent blue was to the Olmecs. And in a way, Olmec jade is even more beguiling. Not only was it the choice of that great early civilization of Mesoamerica, but Olmec blue is even more of an enigma—not because it was rarer than imperial green in ancient times, but because it was more common. Hoards of gleaming blue stone artifacts have been uncovered in Mesoamerica, from southern Mexico to Costa Rica, often fashioned into elegant, highly polished celts. But in all their years of prospecting, the Ridingers have discovered only one significant cache of the raw stone—the hundred or so river boulders weighing about a ton. It’s this discrepancy, remarked by Alexander von Humboldt, between its ancient abundance and its modern rarity, that makes the stone so tantalizing. Where did the Olmecs find it? Are those sources depleted? Had the Ridingers stumbled over the very last of the Olmec blue?
PART III
THE STORYTELLERS
EIGHT
Los Jaderos
Russell Seitz hadn’t been to Guatemala in years. But in early 1999, the one-time field director of the Mesoamerican Jade Project was back in Antigua, on holiday with his fiancée. Making the rounds of the city’s jade and jewelry shops, he inquired about the stone the merchants had been getting from their pickers in the campo. “Have you seen any funny-looking jade recently?” he’d ask the proprietors. In the heart of the Antigua tourist district, at a shop called El Reino del Jade, he was told to take a look on the roof, where the stone was piled while waiting to be carved.
When he began to poke around the heaps of rock, Seitz was astonished: Among the run-of-the-mill shades of grayish green, he spied one about the size of a human hand, blue and translucent, to his eye nothing like the “opaque,” “oatmeal-colored,” “worthless,” and “inexportably bad” jade he generally saw around town. In fact, the stone struck him as the finest jade he’d ever seen in Guatemala. “Lordy,” he thought, “this is Olmec type. Where did it come from?”
Seitz pressed the store’s manager, Carlos Morales Cornejo, for the source of the jade. Morales didn’t know, because it had come in from one of his prospectors and had been dumped with all the rest, but he agreed to try to trace the mystery stone. His vacation over, Seitz returned to Boston.
It was nine months before Morales and his prospector Carlos González tracked down the picker who’d found the blue jade and persuaded him to lead them to the source. Seitz went back to Guatemala, and he and Morales drove out the Atlantic Highway to González’s town of Teculután, where the Ridingers had made the emergency landing in their helicopter. Then the party left the road and, guided by González and a man named Cerminio León, continued on foot northwest along the Río Blanco. For two days, they trekked into the desolate Sierra de las Minas, skirting a half-mile-deep canyon and climbing more than five thousand vertical feet, until they reached a grass-covered clearing at a place called El Ciprés.
Seitz was “thunderstruck” by what they saw there: Prospectors had dug a shallow trench fifty yards long by two yards wide, exposing a mass of blue-green jade—“not just a bunch of boulders,” Seitz reckoned, but “a competent vein of jadeite.” Though it was “not grade A,” he judged it “better than what you get in the valley and better than anything that we saw in the 1970s,” when he was working for the Mesoamerican Jade Project.
Seitz returned to the States with a hundredweight of the stone packed in his luggage. After Harvard’s Hoffman Laboratory for Experimental Geophysics confirmed that the samples were jade, he sent specimens to George Harlow, at the American Museum of Natural History, for corroboration. Then Seitz gathered a team to return to Guatemala. Other commitments kept Harlow from joining on this visit, so Seitz was accompanied by Karl Taube, an archaeologist at the University of California at Riverside, and Virginia Sisson, a geologist from Rice University. Though their motives were academic, not mercenary, the band at first dubbed themselves “the Jade Raiders.” Then, eager to avoid any piratical connotation, they adopted the tamer “Los Jaderos,” “the Jade People.”
Arriving in March 2001, Los Jaderos followed González to a mass of jade boulders along the Río Hondo. They climbed into the sierra until they reached El Ciprés, where they were excited to find an old stone roadway as well. Then Los Jaderos heard rumors of even more jade some thirty miles away, at a place called Quebrada Seca, in the mountains south of the Motagua. But they had run out of time and would have to wait till June to return to Guatemala and verify the reports.
The Quebrada Seca site was especially intriguing, because at one time only the north side of the Motagua Fault was thought to meet the requirements for the formation of jade. For the past several years, there had been hints of jade to the south—pink and lavender near the village of La Ensenada, blue-green in the Río El Tambor and near the towns of Carrizal Grande and San José—but none of this prepared Los Jaderos for what they saw at Quebrada Seca in June. It was “the big one,” announced George Harlow, who joined the group for this second trip. Nearby, they found other important deposits of jade scattered over many square miles, leading Los Jaderos to estimate they had expanded the range of known jade deposits in Guatemala by at least sixfold.
Most of the stone was of indifferent purity with no commercial value—a “dull sea of pastel blue-green and gray,” as Russell Seitz described it. George Harlow agreed: “It’s stuff that you could slice up and make nice tile out of. But you couldn’t make much jewelry.” Some of the jade, though, was a spectacular translucent blue. “We had worked for a month in Burma,” said Virginia Sisson, “and didn’t see anything as good as this.” And whereas the Ridingers had found only small cobbles of blue jade, here there were “bus-sized” boulders of it, including one estimated to weigh three hundred tons, among the largest jadeite rocks ever discovered.
Why hadn’t the huge source been unearthed before? With geologists telling them that jade would be found only on the north side of the Motagua, prospectors had been concentrating their efforts across the river. And located a two-day, uphill hike from the valley, the new find lay in a remote region not often traveled. But since the end of the civil war in 1996, more people had ventured into the area, to farm and to prospect for jade.
Ultimately, the explanation lay not so much in geology or topography or demographics as in meteorology. In October 1998, Hurricane Mitch had lingered over C
entral America for five devastating days, loosing more than six feet of rain and spawning floods and avalanches that killed nearly twenty thousand people. In Guatemala, where the Motagua crested a ruinous thirty-one feet above flood stage, almost three hundred people had died and damage had been counted at three quarters of a billion U.S. dollars.
But for jade prospectors, the hurricane was, as Russell Seitz put it, “a perfect storm,” sweeping away feet of soil and exposing jade boulders along tributaries both north and south of the Motagua. Locals traced the trail of stones back up the mountains to the outcrops stripped of soil by the hurricane. Then they sold the jade to shops in Antigua, where the vacationing Russell Seitz had happened to see it.
Los Jaderos reported their find in the December 2001 issue of the journal Antiquity. “Some of the recently recovered jadeitites,” they wrote, “have the combination of composition, minor minerals, and visual characteristics . . . that point to these newly discovered (or rediscovered) deposits as excellent candidates for an ‘Olmec-blue’ jade source.” Behind the scientific detachment, their meaning was clear: They believed they had discovered the lost jade mines of the Olmecs.
The story wasn’t picked up by the general press until the following May, when the New York Times published a piece under the headline, “In Guatemala, a Rhode Island-Size Jade Load,” giving the impression that the jade was scattered over some 1,200 square miles. Within days, Los Jaderos’ find attracted more attention than the discoveries of all their jade-hunting predecessors combined. “Source of Olmec Treasure Discovered in Guatemala,” the Associated Press reported. “Since the 18th century, collectors, geologists and archaeologists have sought the answer to a frustrating mystery: The ancient Olmecs fashioned statues out of striking blue-green jade, but the stone itself was nowhere to be found in the Americas. Now scientists believe they have discovered the source—a mother lode of jade in Guatemala that could tell much about ancient American civilizations and about the formation of the continent where they lived.”
Academics not involved in the expedition were also impressed. “It’s an early step but a very important one,” said Jeremy Sabloff, then of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. “I think it’s very exciting and has a huge amount of cultural and historical potential.” Archaeologist Héctor Escobedo, then of Guatemala’s Universidad del Valle but now minister of culture and sports, called the discovery “one of the most significant” in decades and suggested that it accounted not just for the Olmecs’ stone but for “all of the sources for Mesoamerican jades,” making it “the new jewel of our cultural heritage.”
But the Guatemalan government cast a more critical eye. Guillermo Díaz, director of the Instituto de Arqueología e Historia, complained that Los Jaderos hadn’t secured a permit for their research and hadn’t submitted a report to the authorities, putting them on a par with “vulgar thieves.” Philip Juárez-Paz, director of the Department of Mines, grumbled that the first he’d heard of the find was in the pages of the Times, more than a year after the fact. He was also miffed that Los Jaderos hadn’t paid the requisite fee to export jade from the country.
Decades before, academics had condemned the Ridingers for refusing to divulge the whereabouts of their quarries. Now the Guatemalan government was claiming that Los Jaderos declined to reveal the exact location of their discoveries, supposedly to discourage additional poaching. (Russell Seitz calls this assertion “utter bilge” and claims that his group showed the locations to a pair of GPS-equipped archaeologists from two different Guatemalan universities.)
The Department of Mines expressed its displeasure at the alleged lack of transparency and claimed that its own prospectors couldn’t locate the new sources, leading it to suspect that the jade was spread over an area much smaller than the 1,200 square miles reported. (The figure was apparently an exaggeration by one of Los Jaderos; George Harlow estimates the size at closer to 160 square miles.) The department worried that the overstatement would set off a stampede of prospectors into the protected biosphere where the jade was claimed to lie. Explained Juárez-Paz, “We at the Ministry want the mining sector to grow, whether through gold, silver, nickel, jade, whatever. If something like this really exists, it will be wonderful, it will represent economic growth for the local communities. . . . But we believe it’s necessary to set the record straight and not exaggerate the news. And if people want to request permission to search an area, let them do so following the steps that the law requires.”
George Harlow responded that the Instituto de Arqueología e Historia had told Los Jaderos that a permit wasn’t required, since they weren’t doing a formal excavation. To the Department of Mines, he apologized, explaining he didn’t realize permission was needed to export the stone and in fact had never requested a permit to take jade out of the country in the past. For his part, Seitz claimed that the government had known about his prospecting since the 1970s, when he was accompanied into the field by a state geologist, but had never requested him to secure a permit. “Does looking at rocks require a license?” he asked. But, mindful of museum politics and the need for diplomacy, he also e-mailed an apology to Juárez-Paz, who asked Los Jaderos to take more care in the future.
In Antigua, the newspaper reports also peeved the Ridingers, who’d considered themselves the discoverers of Olmec blue jade since 1987, when their cousin and employee Andy Duncan had found that ton of bluish boulders along the Motagua River. In August of that year, Mary Lou Ridinger had passed out specimens at the Denver Jade Conference, and after Los Jaderos’ find was publicized, she told a reporter for the Miami Herald that one of her samples had been given to George Harlow. But apparently, the Ridingers’ blue stone had slipped his mind by the time of Los Jaderos’ discovery, some dozen years later. For the Ridingers, the Times article constituted “a lightbulb going off”; in fact, it was their competitive regard for Seitz’s team, as much as the rumored plans of Ventana Mining, that would prompt their extraordinary burst of prospecting beginning in 2002.
But Russell Seitz wasn’t impressed by the Ridingers’ claim. Most of the jade they sold was green, black, and other colors, he pointed out, and the little blue they did have, had been collected from river rocks, not from an outcrop. (Whereas prospectors prefer their jade as loose boulders, already free of other rock and often conveniently sized for transport, scientists like to find their jade in the ground, where the stone’s surroundings tell a bigger story about the local geology—just as archaeologists want to see an artifact in its “context” to appreciate its significance.) Whoever found the blue jade first, Seitz concluded, “One thing’s for sure.” The Antigua merchants “haven’t been selling good-quality, blue-green jade in any significant quantity.”
For geologists, Los Jaderos’ find offered a rare window into the collision of tectonic plates, since rocks formed through such processes are generally driven deep underground and not to the surface where they can be studied. “The material exposed [in the mountains around the Motagua Fault] is probably one of the best records on Earth of this kind of event,” George Harlow pointed out. Moreover, most such stones didn’t have the historical and cultural significance of jade. “It’s exciting,” Harlow added, “because it’s an opportunity to connect the archaeology and the geology together.”
From a geological point of view, the most puzzling aspect of Los Jaderos’ discovery was that the jade on the north side of the Motagua Fault seemed to be only about seventy million years old, while the jade on the south side appeared to date back to about 125 million years ago. Why did the jade seem to form at two different times?
These ages were measured by a technique called argon-argon dating, not of the jade itself but of minerals such as mica and hornblende, which are thought to have formed around the same time as the jade. Because rocks aren’t alive, they don’t absorb carbon from the environment, the way plants and animals do, and therefore can’t be dated through carbon-14 testing (which in any event, isn’t a
ccurate for objects older than sixty thousand years). But some minerals do contain other radioactive isotopes that can be measured. One such isotope is potassium-40, which decays very slowly (with a half-life of 1.25 billion years) into argon-40 and calcium-40. Because argon is inert, meaning it doesn’t readily combine with other elements, rocks contain no argon at formation; so any argon found within them must result from this decay of potassium. Using a mass spectrometer, researchers can precisely measure the amount of argon in a rock and from that calculate how long ago it was created; the more argon relative to potassium, the older the rock.
The situation became more complicated when Hannes Brueckner, professor at Queens College and research adjunct at both the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History, retested the Motagua rocks using a different method that relies on the decay of another radioisotope, 147-samarium, into the element neodymium. According to Brueckner’s measurements, the rocks on both sides of the fault formed around the same time after all—about 120 million to 140 million years ago. How to account for the different results? Although the argon-argon method is very precise, its “clock” resets to zero when rocks are heated to high temperatures, which causes all the argon to escape; samarium-neodymium decay, on the other hand, isn’t affected by such changes. So it appears that the jade on adjacent sides of the fault formed at the same time, but that something happened about seventy million years ago to reset the age of the stone to the north. It could have surfaced later than the southern stone, for instance, in a kind of reshuffling of the geologic cards, or it could have been reheated by some event that didn’t affect the rocks to the south.
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