Jade, Agriculture and Long-distance Trade
There are two types of true geological jade: nephrite (used in most of the extraordinary Chinese jade carvings from past millennia) and jadeite, the type most often found in the Americas. Jade deposits have not yet been securely identified by geologists in Costa Rica, yet many hundreds of thousands of pre-Columbian jade or jade-like artifacts known to be from the country are in museums and private collections around the world. The INS Jade Museum in San Jos� alone has more than 8,000 jade pendants, not counting individual beads.
Deposits of rocks that are similar to jade in color and hardness (chalcedony, serpentine, and green jasper, among others) and which are formed by the same metamorphic geological process are known from the Santa Elena Peninsula in northwest Costa Rica and perhaps some riverbeds south of Lim�n. Is it possible that true jade sources here were mined to virtual exhaustion, hidden by rising sea levels or covered by landslides and silting?
Given the sheer quantity of jade and jade-like pendants and beads produced by Costa Rican lapidary artisans over eight or nine centuries, I do not completely reject this hypothesis, but today most archaeologists believe that Costa Rican jade objects were carved of jadeite from the well-known source in southern Meso-America, the Motagua River Valley in Guatemala. This implies a thriving long-distance trade by land and/or sea several centuries before Christ.
The Motagua source is huge and varied in color, and did supply the raw materials for the great number of Maya jade carvings and those of other Mesoamerican civilizations up through the last the Aztec of central Mexico. It is probable that this source also supplied the lapidary craftsmen of Mesoamerica s first civilization, the Olmec of Gulf Coast Mexico and their trading partners. The Olmec were the first to revere jade as a precious symbolic material and carved it into beads and small pendants as early as 1000 B.C., reaching their apogee in the extraordinary pendants produced from 600-400 B.C.
But there is an enigma concerning Olmec and Costa Rican jades that has yet to be resolved. Both are often blue-green in color and emphasize more sculptural, three-dimensional styles, while Maya jades are usually apple green and favor flat plaques with low-relief or engraved designs. Some of the earliest and best Costa Rican jades and ceramics even incorporate Olmec design motifs and iconography.
For both the Olmec and the Maya, jade symbolized water and the young, growing maize plant, both things vital to life and culture. Green maize leaves reflected in still water offered a deep, cool vision paralleled by the lustrous surface of a translucent polished jade. In the Florentine Codex, one of the early Spanish chronicles, Fray Bernardo de Sahagun noted that the hieroglyph for jade was used as a day name in the Maya sacred calendar, where it stood for rain Rain was essential for the maize crop, and water in streams and reservoirs insured the survival of the Maya communities in the long dry season from January to May.
It is very clear that jade in pre-Columbian Costa Rica had symbolic associations similar to those found in Mesoamerican cultures to the north: water, young maize plants, seeds, fertility, things associated with agriculture and, by extension, elite or ruling-class status. It would probably not be going to far to say that jade symbolized the basic vital force responsible for the sustenance and survival of the cultures that revered it.
At least several dozen Olmec and Maya jade pendants known to have been found in Costa Rica are in private and museum collections; they are long distance trade pieces. The superb Olmec Tib�s (described below) was excavated by the author, and is the only one with scientific archaeological context.
The currently generally accepted hypothesis is that formulated by Costa Rican archaeologist David Mora, which postulates that Maya traders brought some of their own jades along with other, older Olmec jades looted in prehistoric times from Mesoamerican tombs, around the time of Christ. Yet, if this was so, why did Costa Rican lapidaries choose to follow the Olmec style, one very unlike that of Maya jades, especially if face-to-face contact was with the Maya? To date, no greenstone pendants of any kind have been with Costa Rica s oldest known ceramic complexes, which were contemporary with the Olmec civilization. They may still remain to be found, and only in this way will we be able to clarify the Olmec-Costa Rican jade enigma.
A Costa Rican Elite Burial Complex and the Tib�s Jade
For many decades, looters tales of finding elaborate burials with the bodies apparently laid out on carved stone metates and accompanied by jade pendants, mace heads and sometimes carbonized maize, were the only sources for this tantalizing and interesting association.
Keeping in mind the water-maize-fertility symbolism of jade, most Costa Rican jade pendants incorporate the form of a polished axe below a figural representation. Real polished axes (celts) were wood-splitting and tree-felling tools. Trees were felled to clear land for agriculture. Metates were used to process agricultural products, and when they were elaborately carved with incorporated sculpture and show little use, they were likely used in rituals and ceremonies to appease agricultural deities. Mace heads were symbols of high status, rank and perhaps special clan affiliation; like the jades, they were purely symbolic, not functional.
When all are found together in burials, it is a sure sign of the most prestigious cemeteries of this period. But even when archaeologists realized that jade predated gold in ancient tombs (specifically through the excavations and publications of this author), no scientifically controlled context was known.
The famous Tib�s burial ground changed that. While Head of Archaeological Research in the National Museum in the late 1970s, I received an anonymous midnight telephone call advising me that looters were devastating a pre-Columbian cemetery in the San Jos� suburb of Tib�s. We immediately went to the site and found it to be true: workers clearing land for a small housing development had accidentally turned up stone grinding tables, ceramics and jades with a back hoe, and had begun looting using the same heavy machinery. It is uncertain how many such days had passed and how many precious objects were lost, but we settled in for almost two months of controlled excavations, with an armed guard at night.
We quickly found several mace heads (in all, 27 were found) and identified the few pottery vessels and fragments as belonging to the Pavas and early Curridabat complexes, ca. 1-400 A.D. There were absolutely no stones forming tombs or marking the burials in any way, a rare occurrence.
Midway through the excavation, I was hand-trowelling a wall when I hit the edge of a large rectangular metate. A minute later, I was looking at the edge of a 22-centimeter jade pendant, huge by any standard. Darkness was falling, so we posted an extra guard and returned the next day at 5:00 a.m.
It took all that day to uncover the burial, consisting of three stone tripod metates as a funeral bier, upon which was laid a badly deteriorated skeleton, a superb jade avian axe god pendant, two white mace heads, and a 33-centimeter Olmec jade clamshell with a low-relief carving on the interior showing a human hand with bow tied on wrist holding a winged fantastic animal half baby jaguar, half insect. This extraordinary piece was lying face down, and I thought it was a very large polished axe until I finally turned it over at 5:00 p.m. that day after taking countless photographs of the burial.
Later analysis showed that the deceased was 25-year-old male, quite young to have been buried with such splendid offerings.
The Olmec jade clamshell was made to be hung horizontally and was perforated in the typical Olmec fashion, two pairs of holes that met inside the piece and were invisible from the front. The front-to-back holes were probably added later in Costa Rica. What we had found, then, 10 minutes from the National Museum, was one of the largest Olmec jades known, exquisitely carved in southern Mesoamerica around 500 B.C. and then buried in Costa Rica with local artifacts dating to about 300 A.D.
It was thus an exotic heirloom and we do not know how and when it made its way to Costa Rica. The interior carved and engraved motif is unique in known Olmec iconography, only the folded-down wings appear outspread on some large Olmec stone sculptures in Mexico and Guatemala.
Other Burial Practices from 400 B.C. 400 A.D.
Along the Gulf of Nicoya, Juan Vicente Guerrero of the National Museum has excavated bundle burials in a mangrove swamp, in which the bones of one or more individuals were arranged neatly with offerings and wrapped in a burlap-type coarse cloth for interment. The swamp environment served to preserve even wooden beads, and metates and a simple jade pendant were also found in a burial dated by Carbon-14 to 400 B.C., the oldest date for jade carving yet known in Costa Rica.
At the Severo Ledesma site near Gu�cimo in the Atlantic lowlands, I excavated several long rectangular tombs of stone river cobbles, and one contiguous group of 13 tombs, each containing a jade pendant. Three rectangular house foundations of stone cobbles were also excavated and elaborate burials were found beneath and around them. These rectangular house foundations were the first clear evidence of house forms for this time period. It is notable that the proportions of the rectangular tombs and houses, and even the internal divisions of the larger 75 by 50 foot house, are all roughly 3 to 1 the tombs were houses for the dead.
I do not believe it was coincidental that square-cornered houses and tombs dated to the same time as the jade carving tradition in Costa Rica, as virtually all structures in Mesoamerica where the reverence for jade and the carving techniques began many centuries before Christ are also quadrangular. This is a reflection of the importance of the four cardinal points in their mythology, where north, south, east and west are assigned different colors, deities and so forth.
The shape of domiciles in prehistoric cultures around the world is seldom casual, representing instead the world view of each culture. So, with jade/greenstone carving so important during this time period, along with rectangular structures and bell-shaped storage pits, we seem to see a strong Mesoamerican (northern) influence in almost all of Costa Rica, forming a veneer over the indigenous tropical forest cultures.
When gold and metallurgy, originating in South America, appear later in Costa Rica, house forms become circular, tomb forms change, ceramics and stone sculpture shift styles drastically, and gold eventually supplants jade as the most revered, high-status symbolic substance. Again, even more clearly, we see Costa Rica, with its rich cultural diversity, as the crossroads of pre-Columbian America.
