Posted on 03/11/2015 2:02:44 PM PDT by Red Badger
The jade artifact, which has cleft rectangles, incisions and a cone at its top, was discovered underwater in Veracruz, Mexico.
Photo courtesy Professor Carl Wendt
A mysterious corncob-shaped artifact, dating to somewhere between 900 B.C. and 400 B.C., has been discovered underwater at the site of Arroyo Pesquero in Veracruz, Mexico.
Made of jadeite, a material that is harder than steel, the artifact has designs on it that are difficult to put into words. It contains rectangular shapes, engraved lines and a cone that looks like it is emerging from the top. It looks like a corncob in an abstract way archaeologists say.
It's an "extraordinary and unusual archaeological specimen made of mottled brown-and-white jadeite," the team wrote in an article published recently in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.
Jack Hunter, a diver with the Arroyo Pesquero archaeological project, discovered the artifact in 2012 while diving with Jeffery Delsescaux about 2 to 3 meters (6.6 to 9.8 feet) below the surface of a deep stream.
"Underwater conditions were particularly challenging and included near-zero visibility and many obstructions, including large logs, smaller debris, partially decomposed leaves and other vegetation," the team wrote.
The artifact dates to a time when a civilization now called the Olmec flourished in the area. The Olmec people built stone statues of giant human heads and constructed a city now called "La Venta" about 10 miles (16 kilometers) northeast of Arroyo Pesquero. The city, which may have supported some 10,000 people, contained a 112-foot-high (34 m) pyramid.
What is it?
The artifact, which measures 8.7 centimeters high by 2.5 centimeters wide (3.4 inches by 1 inch) at its widest point, is tricky to decipher.
"The iconography is pretty difficult to interpret; it's definitely not clear," said Carl Wendt, a professor at California State University, Fullerton who is directing the project. "It seems to be an abstract representation, I believe, of a cob of corn," he said. Corn, along with beans and squash, was an important part of the diet for people in ancient Mesoamerica.
The artifact may have had several uses. "While it certainly could have once been the handle of a bloodletter, in its current form, we argue that it probably would have been attached, as a finial, to a staff and functioned as a symbol of power and authority," the team wrote in the article.
In the end, the artifact may have been placed in the stream as an offering, Wendt said. The offering could have been connected to deities, ancestor veneration or magic, he added. Over the past 50 years thousands of artifacts have been found at the site and they may have been left as offerings, archaeologists say.
A sacred place
The site where the artifacts were found is a place where freshwater intersects with saltwater, Wendt said, noting that jellyfish from the ocean can get into the stream during heavy rain. To the Olmec, this intersection of freshwater and saltwater may have had great importance.
"While having practical importance today as a spot to collect freshwater, in Olmec times, the confluence would also have been important for symbolic and cosmological reasons, and an ideal place for a ritual hoard or votive offerings," the team wrote in the journal article.
So far, the archaeologists have found no buildings at Arroyo Pesquero that date to between 900 B.C. and 400 B.C. (when the offerings were made). Rather it is the water that is important the researchers said.
"Freshwater, so critical to daily life, was relatively scarce in a region of stagnant swamps," the team wrote. "It is no wonder that springs and other freshwater sources were sacred places, and sacrificing at them was an important part of Olmec ritual."
Wendt co-founded the Arroyo Pesquero archaeological project in 2005 so that the site could be studied scientifically. While thousands of artifacts have been found at the site over the past 50 years many lack details about their origins. Some of them were found by looters and are in private collections.
PinGGG!.....................
Looks like an ear of corn to me.
Hops was unknown in the New World until the pasty white guys showed up.....................
How did they carve it?....................
Seems obvious to me....rocket ship.
How did they carve it?....................
That is the truly amazing thing about these jade
artifacts. They could only be carved by abrasion
using hard or harder grit materials and all by
hand.
As an artist when I look at some of the inscriptions
and carvings made in this material I am just lost
to realize it was done by hand.
Even the Chinese jades used some primitive grinding
machines such as bow drills and foot powered lathes,
but as far as we know the artisans of this
time didn’t have them.
Corn holders for eating corn on the cob.
A diamond will cut diamond, so jadeite will cut jadeite?.............
It’s really remarkable. For grinding, drilling and some polishing, carborundum and garnet come to mind. Garnet is pretty common though not in jewelry quality in the Southwest, USA so it might be found further south.
It’s obviously a prototype cop killer bullet!
At the risk of being laughed off the forum...
At first sight it reminded me of a Ram Jet Engine. Control Boxes, Fuel injectors and a nose cone similar to those used on the SR-71’s engine.
A primitive human might have carved out something similar as a ‘representation’.
Bottle stoppers.
Best post so far.
Shhhh....! You’ll ruin a great story....!!!
Mighty kind of you, Sir. If they were they were a rich man’s bottle stopper then and a very rich man’s now. Now where did the jadeite decanters go?
Thanks Red Badger.
In the great scheme of things steel is relatively soft. So is jadeite.
Remember, these were Stone Age people: they knew their rocks. They understood that one type of stone will abrade another type. For general reference to stone hardness the scale developed by Friedrich Mohs is helpful: Mohs Hardness Scale
Jadeite falls approximately into the range of quartz: 6.5 to 7. Jadeite differs from other stones in one major respect: because of its fibrous interlocking crystalline structure it's very tough. Glass is pretty hard but it shatters easily; it's not tough. Jadeite doesn't shatter without great effort and that's why, along with is color range, it and its "sister jade" mineral nephrite, have been revered by several cultures for making axes, hammers and ceremonial objects.
Exact Olmec carving methods remain unknown but emery, which has the hardness of corundum (next to diamond) is found widely in Mesoamerica. With lots of time and labor (which the Olmec had in abundance) it will abrade most other stones. Larger angular pieces of emery sand would be used for initial stock removal while smaller and smaller emery powders would remove cutting scratches and transition to polish. It could also be used as an abrasive for hand-drilling and other purposes.
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