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Contents Feature - Jade Rock hard Seeing green Birth of rock Jade in Mesoamerica Golden opportunities Rockhounding Cartographer's table Just the facts Games CG vault Re:sources

Buddha sculptures, such as this Happy Buddha from Jade West, are commonly carved from jade as both are revered and bestowed with spiritual significance in Asian cultures where the gem has a long and valued history. (Photo: Jade West)

Like the Chinese, the Olmecs, Maya and the Aztecs all prized jadeite above all else, including silver and gold. They too thought jade was "the stone of heaven."

They believed that jade had medicinal properties, and honoured their dead leaders with jade masks and jewelery.

Both the Aztecs and Mayans favoured bright green jadeite, and Aztec nobility wore bright green rocks around their waist to ward off kidney disease. When the conquistadors encountered the Aztecs they too adopted this practice, and named the rocks piedra de ijada, or "stones of the loins." Ijada is the source of the modern English word "jade".

Unlike the Aztecs and the Maya, the earliest Mesoamericans — those of the Formative period, including the Olmecs — favoured a blue, translucent jadeite and used it to carve masterful figurines, beads and celts (axes used as tools or as ornaments). But while all three cultures created artifacts out of jade, until recently, the source of Mesoamerican jade remained elusive.

Then, in 1998, Hurricane Mitch tore through Guatemala, exposing a 100 km stretch of jade deposits — flanking the north and south sides of the Motagua fault, in the country's eastern highlands. The jades varied in colour from greyish to greenish white in the north, to dark green in the south.

George Harlow, curator of minerals and gems at the American Museum of Natural History, dated the stones and found striking differences in ages of the jades on either side of the fault.

"Jades coming from the north side were found to be between 65 and 70 million years old," says Harlow. "Ones from the south are about 125 million years old."

Harlow hopes this difference in age will help to pinpoint the source of jades used in Mesoamerican artifacts. But he says the differences between the north and south jades are subtle.

"It's not something that you can make out with hand-lens," he says.

Instead, Harlow has devised what he calls "an electron optic method" to identify the jade source of the artifacts. He was reluctant to go beyond this description, as details about the method have yet to be published.

"What I need now is for someone to play ball," he says.

That being said, Harlow has examined small artifacts from Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica, and found them to be examples of jade from north of the Motagua fault.

"Everything is consistent with the [Mesoamerican] jades coming from Guatemala," he says. "We just don't have the data to prove it."

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