Ampliar

Ampliar

The drive of human beings for getting spruced up and beautified goes a long way back and has always been a part of them. From the dawn of man when looking for shelter was the nitty-gritty key to survival, the interest for this stuff came into being.

All through the course of history, all kinds of shavings have been popping up and down. However, jewels have prevailed and have even managed to break free from the fashion canons that rule the shape and color of clothes and footwear.

Small and huge necklaces, rings fitting all fingers and toes, bracelets of all kinds for both the arms and the forearms… you name it. Pieces can be large, bright, thick, slight, brittle, short, opaque, thin or bizarre. Everything counts and everything is all the rage since they are made up of the finest and most varied elements. Touching them is delightful and watching them is music… to the eyes.

No wonder jewelry makers and silversmiths are so entitled to give free rein to their imagination and play with the raw materials Mother Nature has given men for this particular purpose.

Jewels can be made of such precious metals as gold and silver, and decked out with precious or semiprecious stones, even with fossil rocks, crystals, leather and threads. There're no limits as long as imagination runs high.

A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY Objects used to trick out the body are not necessarily supposed to contain precious materials ingrained in them. As a matter of fact, jewelry showed up in history long before man ever learned to tell metals and gems apart.

Some bead necklaces only made for ornamental reasons were worn by humanoids before the coming of the Homo Sapiens. It's not an exaggeration to say that only a handful of people, or no civilization at all, have been unaware of decoration, even when they were simple wooden discs or seeds stitched together.

As nations' knowledge and richness accrued, gold, silver and precious stones began stealing the limelight. A new breed of materials came onstage later and silversmiths rushed to use them merely for highlighting a particular piece and providing esthetic and sensual pleasure to both the wearer and the onlooker.

Since ancient times, Americans worked with gold and silver as they used to represent the primitive deities in those early civilizations that dwelt these lands long before the colonization.

That explains the countless legends about a city full of precious metals whose dubious popularity reached out to the Old World after the arrival of the Europeans and prompted the search for El Dorado.

The down-to-earth truth was the existence of major deposits of precious minerals that gave rise to the development of silverwork in Latin America in keeping with the features of each and every region, their pre-Hispanic roots and the contributions made by conquistadors and migrants to each and every culture.

That tradition leaves no doubt this is a land of artisans with major silverwork development on Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru and Argentina. Furthermore, today's quirky combinations –and the materials this part of the planet is blessed with in plentiful quantities- also speak volumes of this practice. Designers and silversmiths alike rediscovered the virtuosity of ancient gems: topaz, aquamarine, amethyst, rock crystal, turquoise and tourmaline recouped their former glitter and started glowing in bracelets, necklaces and watches.

Onyx, coral, nacre and jade muscled their way through with an exotic decorative flair of their own as jewel makers started taking advantage of the contrast between transparent and glittering stones on the one hand, and opaque and unclear gems on the other.

Thus, they blended emeralds and turquoises, onyxes and diamonds, crystal rocks and red corals, or sapphires and emeralds and rubies, elements that prodded the recovery of some of key elements of the Americas' own history.

LEGENDS AND MAGIC In ancient Mayan society –Mexico and Central America- jade was pricier than gold with a magical-religious value that blurred any material worthiness. That explains the vast use of this particular stone for making sacred and artistic artifacts.

The possession of jade stood for hierarchy and aristocrats used to wear jade-studded earrings, necklaces, masks, chest pads and wrist pads. Even rulers started covering their teeth with tiny jade plates. Jade used to be linked to fertility, to soft corn grains, to water and life. The chalchihuites (round beads made of jade) were at the time put inside a dead person's mouth to prevent him or her from starvation or spiritual paucity in the afterlife.

Rulers and aristocrats were then buried with mortuary masks made of jade to make it easier for the Lords of the Otherworldliness to pick them up and give them a royal treatment in line with their hierarchy.

Jade comes in a variety of colors. The Mayans used black jade in their obscure magic ceremonies. Light green jade was the right choice to open the gateways of life after death. This was the kind of jade found in graves, often forming necklaces, vases and other artifacts.

Another highly coveted hue was the jaguar (dark green with black shades) widely used in good fortune amulets. Blue jade was simply exotic.

For its part, amber is a hard, crack-prone, aromatic and fossilized vegetable resin spurted out by prehistoric trees. This is nothing but a thick fluid that hardened as it got in contact with the air and that the relentless passage of time whipped into a semiprecious gem.

It's not odd to find animal life or tine insects trapped inside amber, critters that were rolled over by the resin drops during the formation process. Amber is mostly found in Mexico's Chiapas, in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, and it originally comes from a leguminous tree, the carob, during the Tertiary geological age. Amber used to be vested with supernatural powers and was often linked to a variety of religious practices and cults.

Before the Spanish conquest in the 16th century, some Mexican and Central American people used it to reward those soldiers who were unafraid of war or death. A case in point was the Chiapanecos, a Mayan-origin civilization that lived in the central part of today's Mexican state of Chiapas, who used to pierce their nasal tissues with amber crystals to make their noses look like giant trunks, according to some ancient records.

At the time, the regions of Simojovel and Totolapa were by far the great amber providers of all Mesoamerican cultures (the population comprising major civilizations that spread from central Mexico to southern Honduras). Even when amber is still dug out in Totolapa, the area of Simojovel is marked by an rooted craftsman tradition in this respect and blessed with a thriving economy based on both the tapping and trade of amber.

Amber reveals in an assortment of colors: light, quasi-transparent, light yellow and reddish, yellow-greenish, purple, yellow-bluish in a variety of shades, very light yellow-greenish, emerald green, light red, fire red, blackish, very light brown, in different black hues (reddish, green, purple and jet black), in an array of indigo blue shades, beige, nacre-like and shaded.

When it comes to making amber gems, artisans use low-grain sandpaper, knives, jewelry tools, cutters, powered polishers and dentist's instruments.

And the upshot is a variety of shapes. The commonest ones are drops, hearts, crosses, triangles, fangs and stars. Big-time craftsmen can cut amber into any animal or human shape, real or mythological figure, depending on his or her creativeness and the size of the gem in the raw.

All by itself or combined with gold and silver, amber can be worn in any kind of jewelry piece.

Another charming reward for designers –this one fished out of the bottom of the sea- is coral, a kind of marine life that dwells in the deepest parts of reefs.

Some coral species are tapped into commercially for making artistic or jewelry pieces since their outer skeleton resembles black porcelain when polished. However, coral's great value is mystical given its oddity and the many risks posed to the divers who collect it.

A legend goes that black corals were formerly labeled as medicinal and sexual driving elements. Some civilizations used to wear it to shoo away evilness for they believed in its magical powers.

Besides those larger-than-life beliefs, truth is corals put a distinctive touch in earrings, rings, necklaces, bracelets, amulets or cuffs when combined with either gold or silver.

NEW WORLD EXCLUSIVES The larimar has no doubt turned out a symbol that tells the Dominican Republic apart. Its luring light blue color, its hardness, its resiliency to be polished and its peculiar glitter make it an excellent jewelry material. Larimar is only found in the country's southwest, right in the Bahoruco Sierra.

Unearthed in the first half of the last century and following a few years of workshop trial, this gem also known as the Dominican turquoise went into full swing in the 1970s and was named larimar. Ever since, this has been the stone of choice when making pieces that identify this Caribbean island nation.

And when it comes to speaking of rarities, the bolivianita cannot be passed up. Formerly known as ametrino (the blending of the Spanish words amatista and citrino), this fledgling gem is now getting its big break in the world market in a subtle combination of violet, purple and honey hues.

This is a stone likened to the quartz family whose only known deposit is in Bolivia, in the Santa Cruz department, where a re-crystallization process occurred millions of years ago triggered the harmonic mixing of amethyst and citrine, giving rise to this magnificent geological wonder.

Nevertheless, nobody doubts the major and most varied stones found in South America are lodged in Brazilian territory. The state of Minas Gerais has gotten a good name for the abundance of diamonds, topazes, emeralds, aquamarines, morganatic stones and other glittering gems –including a variety of kunzites, tourmalines and quartzes.

Two other Brazilian states whose precious stones have put them on the map are Bahia (tourmalines and emeralds) and Rio Grade do Sul (amethysts and agates). Outside this South American giant, the Colombian emeralds from the Muzo and Chivor deposits, the Chilean lapis lazuli, Argentina's odochrosytes, the diamonds found in Venezuela and Guyana, the pearls off Margarita Island (Venezuela) and the Peruvian cresol are worth mentioning.

Indeed, there's a great variety out there ready to meet the most challenging liking of the most demanding human being under the sun.

by Livia Agacino photos by RomerO

(Pies de fotos)

Decorative objects do not necessarily contain precious materials. They showed up long before man could tell them apart and tag them in that category. Researchers have found beads stitched together that were only used for ornamental purposes by humanoids that roamed the earth before the Homo Sapiens.

Many precious or semiprecious stones encased a highly magical and religious meaning for past American civilizations.

Latin America and the Caribbean show off a huge catalog of jewels made up of autochthonous gems hailing from South America.

Jewels have prevailed through the years and managed to break free from the fashion canons.

Gold and silver were wrought in America, two elements that represented the primitive deities of those civilizations that dwelt these lands long before the colonization.