Jade was highly valued by the Maya and other pre-Columbian civilizations, but the source of the stone they carved was lost for hundreds of years. The rediscovery of jade deposits in Guatemala a few decades ago — along a fault line in the Motagua River Valley — has allowed the stone to shine again in the land of the Maya.
Today, jade jewelry in many styles and prices can be found in boutiques, markets and small factories in Guatemala, especially in Antigua, a UNESCO World Heritage site recognized for its rich history and colonial architecture.
Mary Lou Ridinger, an American who moved to Antigua in 1974 as a young archaeologist and soon after found her first jade deposit, is largely credited with reviving the local jade industry.
In the beginning, she said recently, finding jade was not her dream but that of the man she eventually married, Jay Ridinger, and she went to Guatemala to help him. Then she saw an opportunity to reintroduce the stone in a region where it had been prized for some 3,000 years before the Spanish conquest.
Her thought, she said, was: “We need to bring this story back to the people. It’s their story. It’s their jade.”
So instead of exporting raw stones, the couple built a factory and employed descendants of the Maya to carve jade, establishing a business now called Jade Maya.
Mr. Ridinger died in 2009. But Ms. Ridinger, 79, still lives in Antigua, where she runs the business with the help of Raquel Pérez, 52, the company’s Guatemalan general manager, who started working for the Ridingers in 1990. It has 11 stores, nine in Guatemala and two at cruise terminals in Mexico and Belize; all the stores have adjacent museums or at least displays showing timelines and the areas of what are now Mexico and Central America where the stone was revered.
Ms. Ridinger, who has a master’s degree in anthropology with a specialty in archaeology from the University of the Americas, said it was important “to tell people and educate people about jade, because there’s no point in them buying jade if they don’t know anything about it.” She is a frequent conference speaker on the subject and in recent years has become an outspoken critic of environmentally destructive jade mining practices.
She also started an annual event for jade carvers — the IV World Congress of Artists Carving Guatemalan Jade is scheduled in October in Antigua — which includes a competition for the best wearable and non-wearable original jade art. The event is open to artists worldwide, but their work must be done in Guatemalan jade.
Laura Filloy Nadal, co-curator of the new Arts of the Ancient Americas exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, praised Ms. Ridinger’s work on jade over the years and noted that her academic background had given her a different perspective than that of many business people.
“Not everyone sees that scientific and cultural side of a material,” she said.
The women met about 25 years ago, when Dr. Filloy Nadal was at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City and worked with Ms. Ridinger to create a reproduction of that museum’s striking jade mask of the Maya ruler K’inich Janaab Pakal I. (The copy is still on display at the museum’s branch in Palenque, Mexico, she said.)
In Guatemala, Alfredo Gálvez Sinibaldi, a former director of mining in the Ministry of Energy and Mines, said Ms. Ridinger had restored a sense of the value of “an ancient mineral that was forgotten.”
“She is the pioneer,” he said.
A Stone with History
Jade comes in two forms, nephrite and jadeite, with jadeite — the kind found in Guatemala — being slightly harder, far rarer and usually more valuable. And while Myanmar is the world’s main source, Guatemala “has recently reclaimed its status as an important jadeite jade producer,” the Gemological Institute of America reported in 2024.
The Guatemalan stone continued to attract attention earlier this year during the annual gem shows in Tucson, Ariz.
It comes in a varied palette that includes soft lilac, a metallic-flecked black, an array of greens and the blue-green tones sometimes likened to the plumage of the national bird, the quetzal. The subdued colors of much Guatemalan jade can make it a harder sell than some other gems, but the history increases the appeal, said Helen Serras-Herman, a jewelry artist who had a booth at the American Gem Trade Association’s GemFair Tucson and gave a talk on Mayan jade.
“It needs a little bit more story behind it,” she said, “to explain what it is and the value.”
Ms. Ridinger said jade was held in esteem by seven pre-Columbian cultures and was used, along with cacao, as currency along extensive trade routes. “The cacao bean would have been like a $1 bill and the jade bead would have been like a $100 bill,” she said.
By 1519, when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in the region, the jade trade had largely ended. So after the Spanish declared the worship of the stone to be idolatry, subject to severe punishment, it did not take long for knowledge about jade to die out, Ms. Ridinger said.
Jade artifacts and work sites were discovered over the years, but it was not until 1954 that an American geologist named William F. Foshag did a study, published in Spanish, indicating that the Motagua River Valley could be a source of the jade used by ancient cultures.
The Smithsonian Institution published the study in English in 1957 and Mr. Ridinger came across it during a 1973 visit to Washington, D.C. When he returned to Antigua, where he had settled after the death of his first wife, he invited his friend (and future second wife) Mary Lou Johnson to join him in the quest for jade, using the Foshag study as a guide.
It was on Dec. 31, 1974 that she tapped a rock hammer against an outcrop and heard a distinctive pinging sound. It turned out to be jade.
Ms. Ridinger was not the first person in the modern era to discover a jade deposit in the area, though. The first recorded find was in the 1950s by a businessman named Robert Leslie, but Ms. Ridinger said that site was never developed.
Jade Capital
Only a handful of established companies in Antigua are devoted exclusively to jade, but there are probably more than 100 small businesses or workshops in and around the city of more than 60,000 residents that make or sell jade objects, according to William Batres, a Guatemalan who worked for the Ridingers in sales in the 1990s and eventually became a competitor.
He and his husband owned a company called Jades Imperio Maya for more than 20 years before selling it to Jade Maya in 2023.
The Ridingers “invented the jade business” in Guatemala, Mr. Batres said, adding that Jade Maya still is the market leader.
The company, which now has 65 employees, sells finished products made at its two factories, including simple jade pendants for less than $50; a necklace of jaguar heads handcrafted in black jade and strung with green jade and gold-filled beads ($1,023), designed by Ms. Ridinger; and a necklace of light lavender beads with a purple heart-shape pendant ($5,074), designed by Ms. Pérez.
“Everybody in the company designs jewelry,” Ms. Ridinger said with a laugh, adding that clients sometimes come in with their own ideas, too.
In 2023, Jade Maya ventured into jade tourism by opening a bed-and-breakfast in the countryside east of Guatemala City where people can see what jade looks like in its natural state. Called Hacienda Santiago, it is about 120 miles northeast of Antigua and about 25 miles from an area where Jade Maya has long held a mining license.
Ms. Ridinger said Jade Maya had always done surface collection, in areas where rivers had cut through jade deposits, never underground mining.
However, she said, much of the jade leaving Guatemala has been mined illegally, including in protected areas in the Sierra de las Minas mountain range and farther east. She said drug trafficking organizations have gotten into the business, focusing on the bright green jade varieties coveted in the Chinese market.
Organized crime is part of the problem, said Dr. Gálvez, the former ministry official, who has been involved in the country’s mining sector for many years. Those doing the illegal mining, he said, are “powerful people with lots of money, and they can come in with machinery and strip the place in one day.”
“The government doesn’t have the manpower to go after them,” he added.
Dr. Gálvez, who is the vice president of a mining guild within the country’s nonprofit Chamber of Industry, said the organization recently held a training course to teach members of the small national police division that oversees natural resources how to identify minerals such as jade. Jade Maya belongs to the guild, and the course included a visit to Hacienda Santiago.
Ms. Ridinger said she was doing what she could to help build the local industry and to keep jade from being taken out of the country illegally. “If there’s any way I can protect the jade and save it for future generations in Guatemala, I’m always going to do it,” she said.
A Dialogue with Jade
In a workshop owned by Yax Tun Minerals in the southern Mexican city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Noé Sánchez Zebadúa recently was working with a piece of semi-translucent blue jade to create a sculpture of flames turning into a woman. He plans to enter it in the jade carvers’ competition in Antigua, where last year he took second place in both the sculpture and jewelry categories.
Working with jade is part of his cultural identity, he said — something that feels moving, even spiritual, as he thinks about those who came long before him.
The hardness of jade means that “you have to work with it with respect,” Mr. Sánchez Zebadúa said. He thinks of the process as having a dialogue with the piece and letting it show him its limits and what direction to take to bring out its best qualities.
It is not about re-creating the same designs made by ancient cultures, he said, but about trying to find a voice of his own.
“Sometimes it’s nice to flow with the material,” he said.
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