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Jade and String Sawing in Northeastern Costa Rica

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

S. K. Lothrop
S. K. Lothrop*
Affiliation:
Peabody Museum, Cambridge, Mass
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Extract

Costa Rican jade ornaments have been known chiefly through collections made by Padre José Maria Valasco in the Nicoya peninsula, which forms the northwestern corner of the country, and through the subsequent publication of these specimens by C. V. Hartman (1907). The Velasco jade is now in the Museo Nacional at San José and the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh.

The term jade is loosely used by archaeologists. Hartman employed it to describe 3 minerals: a blue-green jadeite, saussurite, which in Costa Rica usually is blue-green with white spots, and a dark green bowenite. These shades are characteristic of Nicoya specimens but not of the jades of northern Central America and Mexico. More recently, W. F. Foshag has identified the principal minerals used for ornaments in Costa Rica as diopside-jadeite and chalcedony (Anonymous 1947, Specimens 1-7, 15-18).

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , July 1955 , pp. 43 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1955

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