Chalchihuites*: Jade Histories of Value and Matter in the Early Modern World

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A well-known passage in the Florentine Codex offers a natural history of *chalchihuitl: its revelation to a few “knowledgeable ones” by the vapor it exudes from underground when viewed against the sun’s first rays; its varieties of green, luminosity, and hardness; the lapidary methods that bring out its brightness and color, materializing it as an object of social, economic, and religious value. *Chalchihuites—translated as greenstones, jasper, and jade—were among the first substances to cross the Atlantic, with other bright matters, like gold and featherwork. Unlike these other materials, which had immediate aesthetic or economic appeal, *chalchihuites occupied a marginal space in early modern European regimens of wonder and value. This paper reconstructs the early modern epistemic, cultural, and sensuous spaces where *chalchihuites circulated, side-by-side with Chinese *yu (via Jesuit missions in Asia) and Amazonian *muiraquitães. It explores European and Chinese conceptions (of color, light, and agency) and practices associated with minerals to reconstruct the transformation of *chalchihuites into materia medica. Reflecting on the limits of translation, it explores how sense and sensory experience are contingent upon overlapping systems of symbolic and technological activity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32448