A few years ago, I received an email from a very talented craftsman in Germany. He was looking for large pieces of high-grade obsidian which he planned to shape into giant black balls about a meter in diameter. “Can I find what I need in Jalisco?” he asked.
Jalisco has the fourth largest obsidian deposits in the world, so I figured he was looking in the right place. However, when I posed the question to several geologists, they told me they had never seen such large pieces of the volcanic glass in this part of Mexico … nor anywhere else.
Years passed. Then, a few days ago, I got a message from Justus Mohl, one of those geologists I had contacted. “I know you are interested in everything about obsidian,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to take a look at a mine with the biggest chunks of it I’ve ever seen.”
So it was that last Wednesday I found myself on my way to Magdalena with Mohl and Jalisco obsidian expert Rodrigo Esparza. I know Esparza had been involved for years in assisting Jalisco artisans trying to make a living from working obsidian, so, as we drove toward Magdalena, I asked “the Obsidian Detective” to talk to me about the exploitation of obsidian as a business.
The young archaeologist began by pointing out that obsidian has been mined and worked in Jalisco continuously for the last 2,000 years and that this natural glass was considered priceless before the coming of the Spanish.
The edge of an obsidian knife, arrowhead or sword was and still is sharper than that of its equivalent in metal.
“Obsidian was considered precious in pre-Hispanic Mexico,” Esparza said. “Wars were fought over it and control of obsidian had much to do with which tribes and cultures dominated in a given area. The problem that we face today is that foreigners are carting away Jalisco’s obsidian (which they can buy for one peso per kilo) and at some point in the not-so-distant future, there won’t be any left at all. Under the Federal Mining Law, obsidian is classified as ‘una piedra de cascajo,’ worthless rubble, considered neither a precious nor semi-precious stone, but in the same category as gravel and cinder. Those of us who study and work with this marvelous material consider this a shame.”
The big problem, explained Esparza, is that in Mexico there’s no control whatsoever over the exploitation of obsidian. When he looks at the amount of obsidian presently on hand and calculates the number of tons being exported from Jalisco daily, he figures that in another ten or 15 years there will be nothing left at all.
“It’s already happened in the center of Mexico,” said the archaeologist. “The deposits of obsidian are all gone and the artisans of Teotihuacán are importing all their raw materials from Jalisco.”
Rodrigo Esparza’s words reminded me of what I had seen with my own eyes in the remote village of La Lobera, in the Barranca de San Cristóbal. I had gone there with a friend interested in purchasing rainbow obsidian, a rare kind in which you can see, deep inside, all the colors of the spectrum. We were shown a shallow quarry where some 75 gunny sacks stood side by side. “That’s it,” they said. “That’s all we have left.” And then the inhabitants of this exceedingly isolated pueblito casually mentioned that their best customers were all Chinese.
“A good example,” commented Esparza. “What people don’t seem to realize is that obsidian is a non-renewable resource. Once it’s gone, that will be the end of it.”
After reaching Magdalena, we drove over a muddy red road to the property of Santos Roble, who had recently sold tons of obsidian to, once again, the Chinese. We approached the padlocked gate and it was here that Roble discovered his key had been damaged and wouldn’t fit in the lock. “No importa,” he said, producing a big chisel and a hammer with which he made short work of the padlock. Within seconds, my concept of “security” changed drastically.
Inside, it looked like Syria on a bad day. The mine was, in fact, a seemingly endless series of deep ruts and pits which had stripped the land bare of trees and vegetation. Mexican laws would force normal miners to restore and replant such an area, but since the law considers obsidian utterly worthless, the impact of the digging on the environment is apparently considered irrelevant.
It was in this place that I found the biggest pieces of obsidian I had ever seen, too heavy for even a muscle-bound Mexican wrestler to pick up.
“Oh no, these are nothing,” said Roble. “At the bottom of that hole over there, we found a far bigger chunk. It weighed exactly 4.5 tons, de veras, and when one of our machines tried to raise it, all four tires exploded at once.”
So, Jalisco’s obsidian deposits, fourth largest in the world, will eventually all end up in China unless the government intervenes. “Obsidian is an important part of our heritage,” said Esparza. “The authorities need to re-evaluate obsidian from both political and economic points of view and to change the existing laws … before it’s too late.”