Recently, archaeologist Rodrigo Esparza gave a talk at Guadalajara’s City Museum on natural resources of indigenous peoples in this area before the Conquista. He mentioned to his audience the “Magic Circle” I have often written about, the confluence of all five of Mexico’s ecosystems within a radius of 250 kilometers around Guadalajara.
While I have pointed out the advantages of this strategic location for ecotourism, Rodrigo Esparza noted that indigenous tribes were “cashing in” on Jalisco’s convenient location for at least 2,000 years. “Each ecosytem,” he said, “brings with it different plants and trees, animals and minerals and the native peoples living here could obtain whatever they wanted by means of trade, because they controlled the most valuable commodity in Mesoamerica: obsidian.”
The Museo de la Ciudad decided to follow up the archaeologist’s talk with an excursion or ronda and wanted Esparza to take people to one of Jalisco’s great obsidian deposits. However, the biggest of them all, El Pedernal, located just 3.5 kilometers northwest of Teuchitlán, can only be accessed via an ugly and smelly garbage dump.
“John,” Rodrigo wrote me, “I’m looking for a better place to take these people: can you show me the obsidian you’ve seen in the Ahuisculco forest? I’ve never been there.”
This forest lies 32 kilometers southwest of Guadalajara and can be reached from the Tlajomulco-Tala highway. A few years ago, the Guadalajara rock group Maná adopted this forest and it is now a Federal Protected Area popularly known as Selva Negra, which happens to be the title of one of Maná’s best-known songs.
The other day, Rodrigo picked me up and off we drove to Ahuisculco. Fifteen minutes from the town, the dirt road we were driving on turned black. At that point, it was literally “paved” with broken chunks of obsidian. Although we still had not reached the entrance to Selva Negra, Rodrigo stopped the car and we got out to look at the steep hillside next to the road. It was literally covered by thousands of chunks of shiny black obsidian.
Rodrigo’s eyes were gleaming. All of these pieces come from a workshop up above,” he said. “Every one of them has been created by an ancient craftsman, and the quality and purity of this obsidian is extraordinary.”
We ducked under a barbed-wire fence and made our way upward, slipping and sliding on the jet-black rocks. Everywhere we found broken knives, hatchets and tools, which had been discarded because they had not turned out perfect. Among them were a surprising number of nucleos or cores from which long, sharp-edged blades had been extracted by an ancient artisan who knew how to skillfully tap just the right spot with the pointed end of a deer horn, to “pop off” a new blade.
Slowly we made our way up to the top of the hill where we found a wide, shallow hole. “This was the mine,” said Rodrigo triumphantly. “Here’s where it all came from. Wouldn’t Phil Weigand have loved to see this!”
We parked outside a large iron gate and walked to an area where Selva Negra personnel have been creating some rather unusual trails. They decided to line both sides of the narrow footpath with ... well, the most abundant “rocks” in the area, meaning, of course, broken obsidian artifacts. I seriously doubt whether another such trail exists anywhere else on earth!
Well, we walked a grand total of 2.3 kilometers that day and along this short stretch, Rodrigo discovered no less than three obsidian workshops and mines. “None of these has been registered,” he said, “and I can’t imagine how many more there must be in this wilderness. Some of these mines are surely the source of obsidian jewelry that we always knew came from somewhere near Ahuisculco.”
The archaeologist took samples whose composition will be studied using a technique called Neutron Activation Analysis which produces a detailed readout of every element present in an obsidian sample, allowing researchers to match an obsidian artifact to a specific area and often to one particular mine. The technique has revealed that obsidian tools found as far away as New Mexico originally came from mines and workshops in Jalisco.
“Gracias a Dios,” commented Rodrigo, “that this is a protected area and Selva Negra can act as an obsidian reserve for the future.” I knew he was referring to other parts of Jalisco where huge quantities of high-quality obsidian are being sold for much less than peanuts and shipped off to China.
If you would like to visit Ahuisculco’s obsidian deposits with Rodrigo Esparza as your guide, you could sign up for the City Museum’s XXVIII Ronda, for which a date has not yet been chosen (but a little bird told me it might be Sunday, March 15). The number of participants will be limited, but you can be among the first to discover the details by occasionally checking the Museum’s Facebook page, “Museo de la Ciudad.”
How to Get There
You’ll find directions for visiting Ahuisculco’s Selva Negra Forest in Volume 2 of our book “Outdoors in Western Mexico” or go to Wikiloc.com and search for “GuadHikes – Ahuisculco to Selva Negra Woods.”