Source, resource, "stone of kings": Prospecting for jadeite in the Motagua River Valley, Guatemala

Abstract (English)

Jadeite, a green, translucent, extremely hard stone, is a marker of ancient Mesoamerica, the “stone of ancient kings.” Yet, for centuries following the Spanish conquest, while jadeite artefacts abounded in collections, jadeite sources remained unknown. In the 1950s, William Foshag, a mineralogist at the Smithsonian Institution, located jadeite in the Motagua River Valley (MRV) in Guatemala. Since the early 2000s, jadeite, which occurs in high pressure/low temperature conditions at subduction zones, has come under scrutiny as an indicator in “earth system” studies. Its presence along two belts, north and south of the MRV, allows scientists to reconstruct geological events from 150 and 70-90 million years ago. The possibility to date jadeite used in ancient artefacts and trace it to specific sources inserts the time of human history unto the abyss of planetary time, making Mesoamerica – a concept constructed in the 1940s -- solid as rock, integral to the earth system. Jadeite, similarly to how Michael Taussig has written about gold and cocaine, “carries the weight of human history in the guise of material history.”
This talk centers on prospecting for jadeite in the MRV -- for both commercial and scientific purposes -- which has intensified with increasing deforestation in the region since the turn of the century. I am particularly interested in the the processes by which human history is folded unto earth history – and on the political and social and economic implications of this folding. I ask the following sets of questions:
1. How is the geological naturalized as a source? What kinds of relations between field and laboratory, scientists and local jade prospectors are deployed in the construction of a source?
2. How do sourcing projects impact the landscapes they map and record? How does a source become a resource, which, in turn opens it up to legal and illegal extraction?
3. What imaginaries are made possible – and what alternative imaginaries are cast aside or silenced – by attaching symbolic/commercial/patrimonial value to a mineral?
Perhaps one of my biggest surprises, as I began reconstructing history of archaeological and geological explorations in the MRV since the 1950s, is finding contradictions at the very heart of jadeite sourcing: between the obsession with purity and the inherent heterogeneity of mineral matter; between ontological fixity and the messiness of human history; between the fixation with discovering untarnished origins and the fragmentation and destruction pending on discovery.