Blade Core
This artifact was used to provide stone blades.
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Blade cores provided a portable source of stone or obsidian for manufacturing different kinds of tools by flaking off pieces from the core. The basis of many Upper Paleolithic tool forms from both the Old and New Worlds was the blade flake, a thin, parallel-sided flake that is at least twice as long as it is wide. Blade flakes were "pre-forms" that could be fashioned into knives, hide scrapers, spear tips, drills, and other tools.
End Scraper
This artifact was used for scraping fur from animal hides.
For European and American Stone Age peoples, end scrapers served as heavy- duty scraping tools that could have been used on animal hides, wood, or bones. Once the hide was removed from an animal, an end scraper could take the hair off the skin's outer layer and remove the fatty tissue from its underside. End scrapers were sometimes hafted, or attached to a wooden handle, but could also be handheld.
Burin
This artifact was used for carving bone, antler, or wood.
Burins are among the oldest stone tools, dating back more than 50,000 years, and are characteristic of Upper Paleolithic cultures in both Europe and the Americas. Burins exhibit a feature called a burin spall&#;a sharp, angled point formed when a small flake is struck obliquely from the edge of a larger stone flake. These tools could have been used with or without a wooden handle.
Awl
This artifact was used for shredding plant fibers.
Awls were small, pointed hand tools employed in both the Old and New World to slice fibers for thread and fishing nets, and to punch holes in leather and wood. Stone Age peoples may also have sliced animal hides to make clothing using awls. These tools could be made from stone or bone and were highly sharpened for maximum efficiency.
Antler Harpoon
This artifact was used for hunting large marine animals.
Upper Paleolithic cultures in Europe between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago hunted seals, whales, and even swimming land mammals such as reindeer using antler harpoons. In the New World, these harpoons appeared only around 6,000 years ago in the arctic cultures of Alaska and Canada. Experts believe antler harpoons were used in tandem with wooden launchers known as atlatls to help the harpoon penetrate prey with more force.
Clovis Point
This artifact was used for killing mammoths and other megafauna.
Clovis refers to this particular style of stone spear point and to the culture of the North American people who used such weapons to devastating effect against large game. Clovis points are leaf-shaped and have a wide groove, or flute, on both sides of the base for fitting into short wooden or bone spear shafts. The largest spear point ever found, measuring nine inches long, was a Clovis point made of chalcedony, a kind of quartz.
Bone Flute
This artifact was used for playing music.
Made of bone, this wind instrument dates to around 14,000 years ago in France. Hunters may have carried such flute-like instruments in their mobile toolkits or been buried with them, perhaps for the afterlife. Other artistic relics of Stone Age peoples, especially in the Old World, include carved figurines, cave paintings, and beaded clothing. France's Solutrean culture of 23,000 to 18,000 years ago is noted for its artistic tradition.
Beads
This artifact was used for personal ornamentation.
It's impossible to know definitively, but experts think beads made of bone, ivory, shells, and teeth were decorative and might also have been traded as currency, based on what they know about the cultures of contemporary native peoples. They have unearthed necklaces, pendants, bracelets, and anklets at Stone Age weapons caches and burial sites in Europe and the Americas.
Needle
This artifact was used for stitching hides.
Stone Age technology included delicate sewing needles made of bone with punched eyeholes. They were probably used in tandem with thread fashioned from plant fibers or animal sinew. Archeologists have found bone needles dating to within the past 20,000 years in Europe and North America, where they might have facilitated clothing and boat production.
Bone Point
This tool was used for launching at animals during hunting.
Bone projectile points were flexible, light, general-purpose weapons for hunting large land animals. To be as lethal as possible, their tips were chiseled to exquisite sharpness. This is a North American point, but bone points hafted onto wooden or bone handles were also common in the Stone Age Old World. A deep groove cuts into the base of the point, where a hunter would have inserted a wooden thrower and secured it with resin.
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«Stone blades of various types and sizes were produced in the Americas as early as people arrived, including projectile points, hand axes, scrapers, chisels, and other tools. Whether uniface (one sharp edge) or biface (two sharp edges), stone blades with beveled edges had the obvious primary function of cutting. By the second millennium B.C., however, ceremonial blades and bodily regalia made from blades became the media of choice for sculptors in the Americas, who created works of art that transcended the utilitarian or functional. For more than three millennia, indigenous artists in the Western Hemisphere created blades that have been noted for their beauty by both ancient and modern beholders. A global look at ancient blades finds analogous cases, such as in ancient Egypt or China, where weapons were inscribed or ceremonial blades were fashioned from precious nephrites.»
An astonishing array of blades from Peru to Mexico is on view through May 28 in the exhibition Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas. The earliest examples, known as celts, are petaloid stone blades (which are shaped like a flower's petals) destined for sacred offerings. Later metal and flint blades of various forms were vital ceremonial objects used in ritual performance. In Mesoamerica, blades made of greenstone, including jadeite, were powerful symbols of power over maize agriculture, a key component of rulers' claims to political power. In the Central Andes, on the other hand, crescent-shaped blades, known as tumis, were intimately associated with themes of sacrifice that endured from the late first millennium B.C. until the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century (fig. 1).
In Mesoamerica, centuries of co-opting agricultural power necessitated that symbolic blades form part of the ritual toolkits for societies such as the Olmec, the Maya, and the Aztec. Early agriculturalists used chert and flint, which appear as nodules in the limestone geology of the Yucatán Peninsula. The crystalline quartz structure of sedimentary cherts allows them to be flaked into various sharp tools using percussion techniques. Lacking metal tools, the Classic Maya (ca. A.D. 250&#;900) probably cleared tropical forests with chert blades. The power of flint blades was also associated with lightning; the fractures of chert during percussion were likened to the unpredictable splitting of lightning in the sky (fig. 2). The chopping of chert blades against wood was equivalent to divine chops of thunder in the sky.
Flintknappers channeled the fractal unpredictability of lightning into masterful scepters in the seventh and eighth centuries. Lightning made manifest in the ground as chert was transformed into profile images of the gods of lightning, which presumably would have been hafted to a wooden staff. Dozens of images of Maya kings and queens exist on stone monuments in which they grasp the foot of K'awiil, the lightning god. The dark brown flint from the site of El Palmar, Campeche, is an exceptional example of one of these flints, known as "eccentrics" for their unique and impractical shapes (fig. 2).
In addition to local chert blades, residents of Maya Lowland sites used obsidian, an igneous volcanic glass, for detailed cutting. This included daily activities such as cooking and weaving, but also ritual activities. Though found primarily in the Guatemalan Highlands, the trade of cores extracted from veins was widespread. Many households, not just elite palaces structures, had access to the blades. Cores, the prismatic raw chunks from which blades were percussed, were sometimes offered in dedicatory caches, perhaps transferring the potential energy of the yet-to-be blades to the space in which it consecrated.
The creativity of Maya obsidian artists shows through in the spectacular pair of earspools excavated at the coastal site of Altun Ha, in modern-day Belize (fig. 3). The sculptor softened the sharpness of the prismatic blades, evoking blooming flowers with the scalloped outer rim. (Floral imagery is a widespread feature of earflare assemblages.) The examples in Golden Kingdoms were originally made for a royal woman, as specified by the delicately incised hieroglyphic text, fill-painted in red, that encircles the earspools' cylindrical forms. Valued possessions&#;one of the earspools was broken and carefully repaired in antiquity&#;these were passed down through generations, and later recovered form a rich tomb of a male.
The most valued material for Mesoamerican blades, however, was jadeite. Mined from sources in the Motagua River Valley in Guatemala, jadeite was a principal medium of sculpture for the Olmec and Maya rulers who commissioned ceremonial blades and blade-shaped pendants. For the Olmec, especially at the large center of La Venta, Tabasco, jadeite and other greenstone blades symbolized solid and permanent maize sprouts. Maize, the staple crop of early Mesoamericans, was very important to sustaining societies, and the cycles of agriculture held specific importance for patrons and their artists. On some celts, people inscribed images of the Olmec maize god, often associated with clefts sprouting young shoots of corn (figs. 4a&#;b). Blades for the Olmec came alive as snarling mythological beings. A tour-de-force example is the hefty blue-green jade "Kunz Axe," where the feet of the deity form the sharp blade (fig. 4c).
Petaloid celts, valued whole by the Olmecs, were split up and worn by early Maya rulers. Maize symbolism was also prevalent in Maya art beginning in the Late Preclassic period (ca. 300 B.C.&#;A.D. 250). The maize god, through veneration and impersonation, was an integral character in the epic myths that underpinned the institution of divine Maya kingship. The split-celt belt ornaments, like the set from Calakmul or the example from the collection of the Kimbell Art Museum (right), added a dimension of blue-green color, textuality through inscriptions, and sonorous output as they clanked together (fig. 5). The Kimbell's celt shows exactly how these sets would be worn, suspended from a larger jade sculpture, similar to the one recovered from the cenote of Chichen Itza, originally from Piedras Negras.
Jade blades from Mesoamerica traveled far and wide as valuable exchange objects, especially by the societies in what is now Costa Rica. (A particularly compelling example of the transcultural value of jades is an Olmec "spoon" recovered far south of the Maya area in Costa Rica, which had been re-used and incised with an inscription by an early Maya king.) A large jadeite clamshell, originally created in Mexico, was deposited in a tomb at the site of Talamanca de Tibás, along with a distinctively Costa Rican avian celtiform pendant (fig. 6a).
This large abstracted image of a bird is a prime example of a category of blade-like pendants made by ancient artists in Costa Rica, known as "axe gods," which also include anthropomorphic imagery (fig. 6b). The sculptors obtained jadeite axe blades that had been created by Olmec or other peoples in Mesoamerica and remade them in their own distinctive styles. Jadeite was such a rare and valued material in Costa Rica, where geologists have found no local sources of the mineral. Some artists thinned pendants, such as one in the form of a crested, long-tailed bird (possibly a resplendent quetzal, Pharomachrus mocinno), created from just one sixth of the original full axe (fig. 6c).
Jades and other greenstone axes in ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia were also transformed into horizontally strung "winged pendants" (for non-blade examples, see the exceptional abstract pendants in tawny agate from Sitio Conte, Panama, or a sublime gold Malagana example from Colombia). Except for a very slight asymmetry in the wings of this masterful pendant excavated at Las Huacas, Costa Rica (fig. 7), there are few traces that suggest the prior life of the bat-winged work was a large jadeite blade. The inclusion of incised triangular heads, apparently human, between the wingtip and the body of the figure suggests that jadeite still retained its association with cutting or chopping, even for peoples in faraway Costa Rica. The closed eyes indicate that these could be trophy heads, which would presumably been disembodied with a sharp, stone blade.
Agurcia Fasquelle, Ricardo, Payson Sheets, and Karl Andreas Taube. Protecting Sacred Space: Rosalila's Eccentric Chert Cache at Copan and Eccentrics among the Classic Maya. San Francisco: Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, .
Berrin, Kathleen, and Virginia M. Fields, eds. Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press, .
Jones, Julie, ed. Jade in Ancient Costa Rica. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, .
Pillsbury, Joanne, Miriam Doutriaux, Reiko Ishihara-Brito, and Alexandre Tokovinine, eds. Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, .
Pillsbury, Joanne, Timothy Potts, and Kim N. Richter, eds. Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, .
Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas, on view at The Met Fifth Avenue through May 28,
See more digital content related to Golden Kingdoms, including a walkthrough of the recent exhibition in English and in Spanish.
Read more articles in this exhibition's blog series.
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