At first, the road is unlit and deserted, but in time, the pine trees give way to an untidy concrete sprawl. We’ve left too late. As we approach Guate, as Guatemala City is familiarly known, there’s a blue smudge on the horizon, and traffic is already creeping. In the old city center, goats are still herded through the streets dispensing milk, and indigenous campesinos still gather in the plaza principal, selling brightly colored textiles. Here on the outskirts, we pass the less picturesque offerings of a developing economy—luxury hotels; junkyards; convenience stores; flat-tire fixers and car-rim emporia; American big-box stores and fast-food franchises; vendors laden with newspapers, peanuts, fresh fruit, toys, air fresheners. Finally, we turn onto the four-lane Atlantic Highway, surrounded by tractor-trailers, military trucks, and wildly painted “chicken buses,” all emitting the blackest exhaust I’ve ever seen. Just east of the capital, we come to the first roadblock, but the police wave us through.
The highway is all curves and hills, and as the tractor-trailers compete to pass on the upgrades, they hold back everyone else. For two hours, we crawl past truck stops and repair shops. Then the road forks and some traffic exits left, toward the coffee and cardamom fields of Las Verapaces. The Atlantic Highway levels out along the Motagua’s slender floodplain, but the sierra looms on either side, the peaks as jagged as a saw blade. Sixty miles from the capital, we come to the eponymous workshop that the Terzuolas discovered back in the 1970s. We pull onto a grassy track, slip the rope off a chicken-wire gate, and drive in. For the next hour, we comb the rolling hills along the river, inspecting fragments of jade knocked loose by workers more than a millennium ago.
A few miles farther on, we pass the one-time tomato field where Robert Leslie uncovered his jadeite boulder. The earth is barren now, and in his soft, serious voice, Vinicio explains that, like much of the land in the area, it belongs to a narcotraficante. But the man has been arrested, and so the field remains unplanted, the campesinos out of work. Next, we come to the tiny town of Manzanal, where Leslie discovered the jade outcrop that he and William Foshag published in American Antiquity. We see the towering modern sign for the Longarone Hotel, where the Ridingers used to stay while prospecting, and the Pepsi plant where they made the emergency landing in their helicopter.
Just beyond, we come to another roadblock. This time, the policeman signals for us to stop, but deep into an explanation of how serpentinite suppresses plant growth, Mary Lou doesn’t catch his signal. As we speed by, I see the surprised look on the official’s face. I tell Mary Lou what’s happened, and a couple of hundred yards farther along she finds a parking lot to turn into. A police picop pulls alongside, and officers with automatic rifles order us out while they search the truck. Meanwhile, a heavy-set, middle-aged man with gold braid on his hat brim approaches each of us in turn, taking down our identities and nationalities. I’m the last, and when I pronounce my exotic name, he looks up from his clipboard with a bewildered expression. I tell him, “Se escribe G—” “It’s written G—” but before I can get any further, he sets down his ballpoint and tells me, “No importa.” “It doesn’t matter.”
We turn off the highway onto a winding secondary road, mostly blacktopped but in places just strewn with gravel. Off to one side, there’s a deep, guardrail-less ravine, and sometimes Mary Lou has to navigate around a landslide blocking one lane. She tells me that when she first started coming here, some thirty years ago, there were no bridges, and she would ford the streams in her truck; in the rainy season, the all-dirt roads were all but impassible. She points to a hillside planted with corn. Deforestation is the inevitable consequence of blacktop, she explains, because it encourages farmers to expand their acreage and ship their produce to market in the city.
We drive through modest but well-kept villages, including Huité, the butt of jokes in Guatemala for the supposed idiocy of its residents; they say it has something to do with uranium in the water. In front of one house is a heap of bluish rocks, but Mary Lou assures me they’re not jade. A little farther on, we pass the outcrop where she and Charlotte Thomson turned their truck around before rushing back to Antigua when war threatened with Belize. That’s the same area where the Ridingers later found their lavender jade and where Asian poachers arrived with guns and dynamite, until the government ran them off.
Not long after, we park above a high cliff and begin walking up a steep dirt lane. The temperature is ninety degrees, and though the way is shaded by trees, we start to break a sweat. We pass modest stands of corn and beans, all tilled by hand, because the terrain is too hilly to plow with tractors; most is too rugged even to work with a horse or mule. It’s been two years since Mary Lou has been here, and she notices the new concrete houses with cars parked in front: The campesinos are doing well in this corner of Guatemala.
Toward the crest of the hill, we come to an older house with a wide front porch and a roof of lámina, corrugated sheet metal. The three pickers are waiting. All are thin, and all are dressed in T-shirts, jeans, and white straw cowboy hats—the two brothers and a son who work this land. One of their wives is called out to greet us, and we shake hands and fill a few minutes with small talk. Inside, two young boys are watching soccer on their new cable TV. Their sixteen-year-old sister, congenitally lame, attends school in Antigua, her tuition paid by a scholarship and her books, uniforms, and incidentals supplied by the Ridingers.
Our hosts lead us down off the porch. In front of the house, next to the smoldering fire where trash is burned, are two modest piles of stone. The larger one, two feet square and just as tall, is made up of green rocks; the other, about half that size, has stones of bluish green and lavender. Vinicio squats to take a look. Usually he makes these trips alone, sometimes with Raquel. But it’s been six months since anyone from the company has been here. Under the pickers’ contract, someone is supposed to come every two to three months to inspect the stone that’s been collected. But the recession and plunge in tourism have cut into sales, and the Ridingers aren’t looking to expand their inventory of jade. They’re under no obligation to take the stone, but they know the collectors rely on the extra income.
The older brother acts as spokesman. Moving to the larger pile, he takes a white enamel basin and splashes some water onto the green stone to bring out its color. Vinicio picks up several pieces and turns them to catch the light. Then he points to the network of fine cracks running through them. In a soft voice, he tells the prospectors that the stone is too fractured to use. The damage isn’t from their pneumatic drill, he explains; the defect was there long before.
Turning his attention to the other pile, he holds up a piece of blue jade to gauge its translucence. The stone is about the size and shape of a raw tuna steak, and it has the same tight grain and uniformity of color. Conferring in murmurs, Vinicio and Raquel pick out some stones. In the end, they choose about a quarter of the smaller pile, clearly less than the prospectors hoped. The son fetches a woven plastic sack that once held corn seed, and the rocks are dropped inside. Straddling the bag, the older brother hefts it. Sixty kilos, he pronounces, 132 pounds. Vinicio accepts the measurement, but they have yet to settle on a price. Under Guatemalan law, the stone doesn’t belong to the farmers but to the government, and the Ridingers have the exclusive license to take jade from this area. So the question doesn’t hinge on the value of the jade but on the fee for finding it, digging it out of the ground, and carting it here. If the Ridingers don’t want the stone, or if they can’t agree on a price, the collectors can’t offer it to anyone else, at least not legally. The campesino goes into his pitch, lauding the quality, color, and rarity. Vinicio responds in a hushed tone. Then he and Raquel confer, the brims of their baseball caps nearly touching, and she takes out of her wallet 1,300 quetzales, about 160 U.S. dollars.
Raquel walks down to fetch the pickup. While we’re waiting, a neighbor, wizened and nearly toothless, stops by on his horse. He’s heard of our visit, and he’s brought a piece
of blue stone that he’s dug from his property. There’s more, he says; are they interested? Vinicio takes the rock and examines it with polite interest. Possibly, he answers, but first they have to assay it to confirm that it’s jade. Is it all right if they borrow it for testing? “Claro,” the old campesino tells them. “Of course.”
Raquel backs the truck up the narrow road. The sack of jade is dumped in the bed, and we start toward Antigua, hoping to make it through Guate before the evening rush.
On the drive to Antigua, I wonder whether our meeting with the jade collectors replayed a transaction enacted over thousands of years in Guatemala, maybe on that same hillside. It’s easy to imagine such a scene, with hopeful sellers laying out their stone for inspection, touting its virtues, haggling over its value. Yet, like so much that’s written about jade, my imagined marketplace is just conjecture. Was the stone sold on the open market back then, or was it mined under royal control? What would the buyers have traded for it? How did it get from quarry to workshop, from workshop to palace? I consider what has, and hasn’t, been learned about Olmec and Maya jade since the day that Robert Leslie discovered his outcrop near the town of Manzanal.
For one thing, it’s finally been proved that Mesoamerican jade was mined in Guatemala, not in China or Atlantis. And it’s clear that most came from around the Motagua River, with its extensive sources and its worksites where the jade was fashioned into celts and other artifacts. Another crucial issue—fifty years after Leslie’s discovery—is whether the Motagua was the only pre-Columbian source of jade, or whether it was also collected in places such as Mexico, Costa Rica, and the Caribbean. Despite George Harlow’s argument that the geology isn’t right in Mexico or Costa Rica, some of his colleagues, such as Ron Bishop, were never convinced. Archaeologists Michael Coe and Clemency Coggins believe that the state of Guerrero, in southwestern Mexico, can’t be written off. There’s evidence that the Olmecs were there, Coe points out, because Olmec-style paintings have been discovered in caves in the area. And so much carved jade has been found nearby that he doesn’t believe the local people would have had the resources to acquire it all through trading (the “criterion of abundance” again).
Coe knows an entrepreneur in the Mexican state of Chiapas who carves and sells what he claims is jade and who once showed Coe a map depicting four Aztec forts forming a protective square around the stone’s supposed source, a location whose Nahuatl name translates as “Place of Jade.” Mexican archaeologist Olaf Jaime-Riverón tells me that small amounts of stone from Chiapas, as well as from Guerrero and the state of Puebla, have preliminarily assayed as jade. He also says that the sites have yielded pottery sherds dating to Late Classic and Postclassic times, from about A.D. 800 to 1500, and he believes that new evidence may push the timeline even earlier. But these findings haven’t been published in an academic journal, and to date no jade deposits have been documented anywhere in Mexico.
In the Caribbean, ancient jade carvings have been discovered in the Bahamas and on Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Antigua (not to be confused with Antigua, Guatemala). But was this stone mined locally, or was it imported from the mainland? Two decades ago, George Harlow allowed that jade might turn up in the Caribbean, along the eastern edge of the same fault that also runs through Guatemala. And in 2008, jade deposits were discovered in Cuba and the Dominican Republic and duly reported in academic journals.
But opinion differs on whether the geological jade from the Caribbean matches the archaeological artifacts discovered there. Harlow argues that the carved stone resembles that from the Motagua because both contain quartz, a relatively rare component of jade. But quartz has also been found in the jade deposits on Cuba and the Dominican Republic, leading other scholars to argue that the carved stone originated on those islands. And the sources on Cuba are reported to show evidence of having been dug in pre-Hispanic times.
So, for the moment, the best we can say is that, while small deposits of jade have been documented in the Caribbean, Guatemala seems to have been at least the principal source for ancient Mesoamericans. Still, what exactly have the Ridingers and Los Jaderos discovered there? Have they really found the jade mines of the Maya and the Olmecs? What does mine mean in this context, anyway?
When we think of a mine, we usually conjure up the image of a tunnel or a pit in the ground. But the pre-Columbian prospectors didn’t obtain their jade that way, any more than the Ridingers and their competitors do now. Instead, the ancients would have collected loose boulders or, at most, dug jade from outcrops or veins near the surface. If they removed a pod of jade from an outcrop of, say, albitite or serpentinite, as modern miners often do, they may have left no more indication of their work, a thousand years further on, than if they had picked the stone out of a riverbed. And if they pried jade out of a vein, centuries of weathering can make it impossible to distinguish manmade fissures from natural ones.
For Olmec or Maya miners, veins of jade would have been even more problematic than for present-day prospectors. With earth or other rock often covering the veins, how would the ancients have known that the deposits were even there? If they did come across an exposed vein, perhaps after a storm had carried away the topsoil, how would they have mined it with stone tools? (Even metal tools wouldn’t have helped much, since jade is harder than steel.) The miners might have taken advantage of natural fissures to pry out pieces, but jade is resistant to such coercion; when it fractures, it makes a noise like a gunshot. They may have used a technique known as spalling, heating the stone until the difference in external and internal temperatures caused it to crack. But that would have damaged the stone closest to the fire, which then would have had to be chipped off with a heavy hammer. So at best, spalling would have been a laborious, inefficient way to mine for jade.
It seems likely, then, that the ancient miners—prospectors, after all, not scientists—got most of their jade the way modern pickers do, not by arduous excavation but by collecting loose stones (or “float”) that had washed down from the surrounding mountains. Not only were such boulders easier to find, extract, and transport, but they offered another advantage. Jade pried from outcrops may be marred by tiny cracks, like the green stone that Vinicio rejected from his collectors. And if these defects were hidden in the center of the stone, they might have been discovered only much later, after a great deal of effort had already been expended on a carving in progress. On the other hand, river stones are relatively free of such flaws, since any weak bits tend to be sheared off in the tumble down the mountainside.
Whether they were digging jade from outcrops or just picking up river boulders, the best evidence that ancient miners give of their activity is generally the stone fragments, tools, and potsherds (and occasionally buildings and roads) that they left behind. Based on such clues, the Ridingers believe that four of their jade sources were worked in ancient times. But the evidence is indirect, and Ron Bishop of the Smithsonian says that such leavings would have to be found awfully close to a jade source to persuade him that they and the mining were from the same era. Conversely, the absence of such clues doesn’t mean that a site wasn’t exploited in prehistory, since it may be that no such evidence was left behind; or if it were, it could have been buried or swept away in the centuries since.
And whether those ancient workers were Olmec, Maya, or later arrivals can also be hard to establish, since that assessment usually hinges on clues such as the radiocarbon dates of plant matter or the style of ceramic objects. It’s difficult to say when a quarry was worked, since each new digging destroys evidence of previous activity. Some present-day researchers discovered what they thought were signs of Maya mining, only to realize that they had stumbled across one of the Ridingers’ sources.
So are the Ridingers and other jade merchants in Antigua taking their stone from the same sources once exploited by the ancient Maya? Archaeologist David Sedat tells me it would be “conceited” of us to make that assertion. Instead, it see
ms that the ancients, like today’s prospectors, happily took their jade wherever they found it over a wide area (now recognized to be even wider, thanks to Los Jaderos’ discovery).
What about Los Jaderos’ sites? Is there evidence that they were worked by the Olmecs? Russell Seitz would be “astonished” if Olmec evidence weren’t discovered there, and scholars such as Olaf Jaime-Riverón, Michael Coe, and Clemency Coggins also suspect that Los Jaderos have found at least one of the sources of the blue jade carved by the Olmecs.
One problem with this theory is that there’s no sign of workshops in the area where the jade would have been reduced to transportable size. Of course, any evidence could have been washed away by the same floodwaters that exposed the veins and boulders of jade. And by the time Los Jaderos arrived, more than two years after Hurricane Mitch, the site was already being worked by locals, which likely would have destroyed any lingering evidence of pre-Columbian digging. Or there may be no Olmec artifacts because the Olmecs themselves never ventured into the mountains; the jade could have been mined instead by local people who exchanged it through a trade network extending to the Olmec cities hundreds of miles away.
But the stone roadway at El Ciprés proved impossible to date, and Taube now believes it might be from as late as the nineteenth century. He and his colleagues have found only one pottery sherd that could possibly date to Olmec times, and the great majority appear to be from the Late Classic period, more than a thousand years after Olmec civilization had collapsed. It’s true that the rugged terrain may be concealing Olmec sites and that Olmec evidence could still be buried at El Ciprés. But the mountain soil is thin and therefore unlikely to hide undiscovered artifacts. So there’s no conclusive archaeological evidence that Los Jaderos’ sites were mined in ancient times. As Karl Taube says, “There is no smoking axe.” He believes that, even if the outcrops above the Motagua were the ultimate source of Olmec jade, the ancient prospectors may have gathered it only after the boulders had come to rest in the valley below.
Stone of Kings Page 20
