First Discovery of Rare Jade in Caribbean Islands

Friday, 16 June 2006 11:46

New York City - An American Museum of Natural History geologist and his colleagues have reported the first discovery in the Caribbean Islands of a rare type of jade, called jadeite jade, known primarily from sources in Guatemala and Myanmar (Burma).  The jade was found in the form of ten mottled, dark-green ornamental axes, or celts, excavated from an archaeological dig site on the island of Antigua in the West Indies, dating to about 250 to 500 a.d.  The new finding is described in the peer-reviewed journal The Canadian Mineralogist by George E. Harlow, Curator in the Museum’s Division of Physical Sciences, and his colleagues.

Previously, there were no documented reports of jadeite jade from the Eastern Caribbean, and there have been only anecdotal or unverified reports of sources of this rock in Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico.  The minerals contained in the jade of the newly discovered axes closely match minerals found in jadeite rock from Guatemala, suggesting that the axes, or at least the jade from which they are fashioned, originated there and then made their way to Antigua as the result of trade among early settlers (called the Saladoid) of the Eastern Caribbean Islands.  This finding is significant geologically and archaeologically as it argues for the primacy of Guatemala as the New World source of jadeite jade and refutes an assertion that all exotic gems and minerals in the Eastern Caribbean were sourced from South America, as no jadeite rock is known from this continent.

The term jade is used commonly to refer to either of two tough rocks—jadeite jade and nephrite jade—composed essentially from a single mineral and often fashioned into ornamental carvings and gems that were traded, worshipped, and worn, the former especially by the Maya and Olmec people.  Many nephrite jade sources exist, but the prominent archaeological and commercial sources are China, New Zealand, Russia, and Canada. Jadeite jade, far more rare and sometimes referred to as New World jade, as geologists first identified it in artifacts from the Americas, is an extremely hard, durable, and beautiful stone, venerated in jewelry, costume, and burial customs by peoples living in what is now Central America and Mexico over a span of two millennia prior to the arrival of European colonists.