A CONTEXTUALIZED ARCHAEOLOGICAL PENDANT TO NEPHRITIC JADE IN THE AMAZON: A POSSIBLE LINK TO CARIBBEAN PEOPLE

“Green stone” ornaments from archaeological sites, also known as Muiraquitã, typically a frog-shaped pendant, found throughout Amazonia and the Caribbean, have been known since the 19th century; and were believed to have been carved in jade, an Amazonia exotic raw material supposed to have come from East Asia. The knowledge of the provenience and production of these artifacts is crucial for testing and improving explanatory models on the movement of people and artifacts, as well as on the complexity and entanglement of social networks’ interactions. It was only in the 2000s that Lima da Costa and colleagues were able to show that muiraquitã artifacts were composed by different minerals and the ones closest to jade were tremolite and/or tremolite-actinolite, that are found in the Amazon region. Despite advances in physical/chemistry characterizations of the “Green stone” ornaments, the vast majority have been on artifacts without any archaeological context. We present here the analysis of a pendant excavated from Monte Dourado 1 archaeological site, located in northwest of Pará state, northern Amazonia, near the border with French Guiana and Suriname. The pendant, found within a funerary context, associated with Koriabo ceramics and anthropogenic dark earth, is constituted by nephritic jade or tremolite-type jade; raw material that do occur in the Amazon region. The lack of other lithic artifacts usually associated with the chaîne opératoire for the manufacture of pedants might be an indication that these ornaments were being produced potentially in the Caribbean region. The detailed physical/chemistry characterization of archaeologically contextualized “Green stone” ornaments is crucial for creating a benchmark for these types of artifacts in order to better understand and improve our knowledge about the historical paths taken by pre-colonial societies in the Amazon e Caribbean regions.