Trading Jade in the Ancient Caribbean (ca. 500 BC – 500 AD)
It has typically been thought that before Columbus discovered the “New World”, there were only a few, large civilizations on the mainland in Central America, with the Caribbean islands holding just a few, isolated villages on their own. The people who lived there were thought to have been fairly primitive, only holding basic interactions with other villages on neighboring islands, if they bothered to even talk to their neighbors at all.
And yet, it now appears that this view may be entirely unfounded. In the eastern Caribbean, 2900 kilometers away from Central America’s jade mines, several 1500-year-old jade axe blades have popped up on the island of Antigua. Needless to say, this is a highly unusual find, particularly if the theory of primitive societies on the Caribbean islands is true… after all, the jade from these Mayan mines in distant Guatemala couldn’t have just appeared on the island by chance! Someone had to bring it there – to that “isolated, primitive village” that typically eschewed outside contact.
It turns out that making assumptions about ancient history isn’t always the best course of action… since it now appears that there was an entirely different social atmosphere in the ancient Caribbean than previously assumed. Instead, it appears more likely that the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers in South America originally served as early trade highways up to the coast of Central American Guatemala. From there, a culture known as the Saladoid people created their own artifacts out of pottery and jade… and eventually moved to the Caribbean islands around 500 BC, becoming the “primitive people” of previous thought.
Since there are no jade deposits anywhere in the eastern Caribbean, it has always been a bit of a puzzle to figure out where jade artifacts from these islands could have come from – not to mention that most archaeologists believed that the Saladoid people only traveled to neighboring, small islands on short canoe trips here and there.
With the appearance of the jade axe blades on Antigua however, these formerly held beliefs are changing. For the first time, a source of jade and the jade from an artifact have been matched – which is how archaeologists have been able to determine that these blades came from a Mayan mine in Guatemala, and the blades themselves can be dated to around 250-500 AD.
What does that mean? Essentially, it means that these “primitive” Saladoid people who were living in the Caribbean were actually maintaining some long-distance trade with people on the mainland of Central America. Their civilization was complex enough to have trade relationships with mainland tribes – and, if they were trading with people from one area, why couldn’t they have traveled up to the Yucatan Peninsula, stopping at various points along the way?
If this theory is correct – and by all means, it should be, since the jade has been confirmed to have come from Central America – these Caribbean island-dwellers must have had some seriously refined seafaring capabilities, probably traveling in large, dugout canoes.
Scientists have also noted that some Saladoid artifacts contain some pieces of turquoise, namely of a type that doesn’t occur naturally in any known area of the Caribbean. So where is the closest known source? Turns out it may have come all the way from Chile… and that those “primitive, ancient Caribbean people” weren’t so primitive and isolated after all!
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Tomorrow: A brief history of polo
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