The Minerals Of Pre-Columbian America

Examining the appeal and prevalence of gold and jade story

- Steve Voynick

The great pre-Columbian Native American civilizations—the Olmec, Maya, Inca, Aztec, and the gold-working cultures of Colombia—left behind as their material legacy a remarkable array of artifacts. Among them are magnificent pieces of gold work, figurines of silver and platinum, tools of copper and bronze, turquoise mosaics, jade masks, obsidian knives, bright-red pigments of cinnabar and hematite, intricate limestone and basalt carvings, and architectural monuments that still stand today.

The creative use of minerals in pre-Columbian times began with the Olmec fascination with jade. As the Americas’ first complex, advanced society, the Olmec preceded the Maya in Mesoamerica (the anthropological region of similar cultural traditions that extends from southern Mexico to Costa Rica). About 2000 BCE, Olmec sculptors began fashioning jade into beads, pendants, figurines, celts (ax heads), and realistic and stylistic human masks.

The term “jade” refers to gem forms of two different minerals, nephrite, and jadeite. Jadeite, or sodium aluminum silicate, is a member of the pyroxene group of inosilicates. With its greater hardness, more intensive colors, and subtle translucency, jadeite is the gemologically superior form of jade. All Mesoamerican jadeite came from the metamorphosed serpentinite rock of southern Guatemala’s Motagua River Valley.