TABLE OF CONTENTS When one speaks of Mesoamerica, which refers to the whole of Pre-Columbian cultures in present-day Mexico and neighbouring countries of Central America, one word that springs to mind is jade. This is because this rock type figured prominently in many of these cultures, in particular amongst the Olmecs, Toltecs, Zapotecs, Mayas and Aztecs who revered this dense, hard rock which could be sculptured and polished and which resisted usage and climatic deterioration well. Of the two different kinds of gemmological jade (see Chapter 22 [1]), only jadeite jade is known in Mesoamerica, nephrite jade has apparently never been found. After the Columbian invasion , knowledge of the geological sources of the jade became lost as the Spanish were not interested in this grey-green rock, dull compared to gold, and also because local commerce was disrupted by the Conquest. Several distinct geological localities probably exist as Mesoamerican archaeological objects in jade are constituted of several different petrographical kinds of jadeite-jade. When the Europeans eventually began to contemplate the origin of so many Mesoamerican artefacts in jade, it was suggested in the 19 th century that they came from China, despite the distance and the fact that China has nephrite-jade not jadeite-jade (until a century later when the Chinese worked and traded jadeite-jade from deposits in Burma [2]). When the jadeite nature of Mesoamerican jade was finally established scientifically, it was necessary to hunt for its provenance...
