REDISCOVERY: 1953 - 1999

Repeating information in the introduction: assumed here on the part of users is some knowledge of the significance of jadeite to the Olmecs, Mayans and Costa Ricans.

In any case, despite millenia of magical objects of great beauty made by the native Central Americans, the magic of jadeite was lost on the conquistadores who were vastly more interested in gold. Jade was of no interest to the colonial cultures either. The sites of raw jade were ignored and forgotten. Jade became interesting only with the flourishing of meso-American geology and, more importantly, archaeology and art collecting in the later nineteenth century.

Must cite Gombrich?s latest: The Preference for the Primitive

In 195

check precise date from an interview in Santa Fe

Robert Leslie, an American, had collected some appealing stones from his tomato fields near the town of Teculutan. He got a scientist from the Museum of Natural History in Washington DC to come to Guatemala to look at them.

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Foshag stayed a while and did a thorough job. He determined that the stones were jadeite; that many of them were the same material as the pre-Columbian artifacts in collections in Guatemala.

Early on the stones were acknowledged to be plentiful and various, but different and inferior to the finer jadeite collected in Burma since the later eighteenth century and fashioned into objects and jewelry in China. The Chinese had access to nothing like the rather common near blacks found in the Motogua river valley, but a few Guatemalan attempts to market this material came to little. Still the jade was known about after 1955 or so. Parts of the area ? most especially the Palmilla river which is so very beautiful and contains huge rocks of many kinds of jade ? were destinations for geologists or curious travelers.

Rocks of pale white, many greens and near blacks were easily pulled out of the rivers and ravines. In 1973 an American set up a factory in Antigua the colonial capital (until

get date ) in the highlands. This factory and its five or more descendants still flourish (or merely get by) in Antiqua. The factories offer art objects, trophies, and jewelry.. Many of the designs are inspired or derivatife of antiquities. Overwhelmingly, the customers are f the local bourgeosie and tourists. The workmanship and finish ? while fine ? is inferior to comparably priced Chinese products. There have scarcely been any efforts to export Antigua?s jade.

The larger factories and smaller workshops that product amulets or other pieces hawked on the streets of Guatemalan and Mexican tourist towns may employ about 200 people. Until 1999, these people were the sole market for the prospectors in and near Teculutan who collect the jadeite in the Motogua river valley. Almost without exception, the Antiguans never went to the department of Zacapa. They requested rock by telephone waited for the prospectors to appear in pick-ups or on the busses.

Scientists, almost always monolingual American academics pressed for time, cursorily surveyed the jade area. Usually their work was a by-product of their wider interest in the Motagua fault which was geologically the origin of the jadeites. A known jadeite area was almost authoritatively circumscribed. In included a few pretty streams that flowed south from the Sierra de las Minas but not much else. This territory could and still can be seen in part of the San Augustin Acasaguastlan quad map (#2260) of the Instituto geogr?ico nacional. The oblong stretched about 15 kilometers west from Estancia de la Virgin to Pueblo Nuevo and was about four kilometers wide. That there were jadeites not of interest to the Antigua market and from streams and ravines far from the scientifically acknowledged jade-holding rivers was of only episodic to locals and only to them..

This whole section of the Motogua river valley and far beyond it is examined only in comprehensive surveys of Guatemala. There never has been any treatment in guidebooks or travel literature. Some editions of the Central American Handbook mention the decent motels nearby. The area is always hot. The land and the people have reputations in Central America for being conservative, hostile and violent -- ?pistoleros?.

Though the geologists, ethnographers and archaeologists -- almost always Americans --did little in the way of walking, looking, or talking-to-the-people field work, back home, all the same, there arose controversies about Guatemalan jade that were vigorously debated in conferences and published papers.

One issue centered on the jadeite that was, it seems, most treasured by the Mayans as well as, much later, the Aztecs of Mexico. This was a brilliant semi-transluscent green from Burma that rivaled the emerald most desired by the Chinese. A name for this Central American material was ?Chitzen green? after the sacred cenote in Yucatan that yeilded large numbers of small artifacts in this material. A few veins and spots of this stuff had been pulled out of the Motagua river valley, but never in larger pieces. Almost needless to say, the locating of a big lode of emerald green jadeite rivaling the immensely valuable Chinese material stone would make a lot of people rich.

Another debate was hotter. For more than a century, vast numbers of small jadeite objects in many and distinct styles had been excavated in Costa Rica. For decades before the 1950's and after these artifacts were refashioned and refinished and sold to collectors and museums. It was clear that the ancient Costa Ricans, like the Olmecs far to the north and long before them, most treasured various semi-transluscent blue and blue-green jadeites. No trace of this material had been found in the re-exploited jade territory of Guatemala. Where did this pretty stuff come from.

The obvious and a popular claim was that since present-day Costa Rica had so much of the bluish jadeites and that Costa Rican artifacts were found only there , the raw material had to come from there. This despite the obvious fact that these bluish jadeites so much resembled the bluish jades that the Olmecs -- so long before preferred for their jadeite manufactures which, almost overwhelmingly were found as a variety of votive axes. Supporting the argument for a yet un-discovered Costa Rican jadeite source was the lack of blue jade objects found between Costa Rica and Olmec territory on the Mexican gulf coast or between Costa Rica and the Motagua river. The source was never found.

The geological and scientifically unassailable view was that the blue jades (sometimes called ?Olmec? or ?Costa Rican blue? had to come from the only area in the hemisphere that, geologically speaking, could produce jade. That is the Motagua fault. Support for this claim was that jadeite is found only in the presence of vastly larger amounts of serpentine. There was no serpentine in Costa Rica.

It is idle here to summarize these debates.

These debates, especially those about the ?Costa Rican? or ?Olmec blues? are critical background for the more detailed text in the discussions about discoveries after 1999. I is worth mentioning that, though many debaters had been in Costa Rica ( a much safer place for travelers), almost none had appeared in the Zacapan jade country. All of them being mono-lingual, they could not talk with the people if they showed up. And, it must be stated, that the few who did show up were there briefly, scarcely looked around and were social oafs.

It is worth while to repeat here that the area known to locals was larger than the area known to the shops in Antiqua and to the scientists -- neiher of which groups cared at all about the issue.. But, before closing, it merits some mentioning of some smaller matters connected with this before the big matter of the publicized discoveries after 1999: A jadeite with appealing pyrite inclusions, called there

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had long been harvested from the rio

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just north of the town of Progresso (see quad map #2160 ? ?Progresso?). In the past ten years prospectors have harvested many coarse-rinded transluscent rocks from the fields north of the town of Rio Hondo (not the river). This can be seen in quad map #2261II of that name. A transluscent pale blue jadeite got the name ?princessa? because, it appears, it was discovered on the day of Diana?s death. An American adventurer had harvested good bluish (but not ?Olmec? jadeites from an escarpment high in the Sierra de las Minas near

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This area is on the ?el Cimiento? quad map, #2261III.

Of much keener interest to this author and more relevant to the main subject of this text was a note about a ?small pebble? picked up in

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and later carefully by a French scientist Fran?is Gendron in the rio Tambor to the south of the Motagua river where no scientist had walked before.

Complete citation.

Partly introducing the next and longest part of this narrative we must know Inocente (Called ?Vicente?) Gutierrez who for decades has been widely acknowledged my Zacapans to be the most knowledgeable about the whereabouts of all the Motagua river valley jadeites. Vicente is in his late 60's, has two wives, sixteen living children, is illiterate and innumerate and is difficult to get along with. Essential for our story is that Vicente had for perhaps twenty years poked about in the rio Tambor and harvested blue boulders very much different from anything seen north of the Motagua river. Vicente sold these rocks to the same man who had started the jade industry in Antiqua 1973. This man hoarded some of the blue green stones sold the rest at very high prices to the some craftsmen from Salvador and Costa Rica. These men, far more meticulous than Guatemalan workmen, made beautiful, readily marketed copies or adaptions of Olmec, Mayan and Costa Rican antiquities.

See quad map #

which had lavenders, blues and greens never before seen ? perhaps by anyone ? not even the Olmecs. The stones were low in total jadeite content, and undependable to work, but the Antiqua workshops factories made jewelry (in the same old designs) from the stuff anyway. The site itself was kept a secret among a very few people. The few prospectors lied about the location as long as they could do so. It was a valuable secret.

This will be filled in and added to: This note 29 January 2003 ? rdm.