Kunz axe
A jadeite axe head from Oaxaca carved as a squat supernatural figure with its arms folded across its chest. The gem expert George F. Kunz published it in 1890, decades before anyone gave the Olmec style its name.
Meaning
The Kunz axe is a ceremonial axe of jadeite, 31 cm (12 in) high, made by the Olmec between 1000 and 400 BC. It belongs to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which lent it to the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the exhibition Golden Kingdoms in 2017–18. The Met describes the axe head as turned into a supernatural figure with its arms folded across its chest, both hands grasping a sharp object, perhaps a ceremonial axe. Both the stone and the form, the Met writes, refer to growing maize: jade stood for maize, and the axe was a farming tool. Axes were usually made of humbler stone, so the jade, the size and the quality of the carving all mark this one as ceremonial. At some point at least two blocks were sawn off the back of the head, perhaps to make new ornaments from the sacred piece.
Origin and history
The axe first appears in print in Gems and Precious Stones of North America (1890) by George Frederick Kunz, gem expert with Tiffany & Co., who had already described it. He called it an adze “believed to be the largest yet found”, carved on its face with “a grotesque human figure”, and said it had been found about twenty years earlier in Oaxaca. He gave its colour as light greyish green with a tinge of blue and streaks of almost emerald green on the back, and knew of no other object of its size and interest. Kunz noticed that fully an eighth of it had been cut away from the back, with a rounded cut on each side that suggested an abrasive drawn on a string held in the hands or stretched across a bow. The explanation then offered for such cuts, he reported, was that when the supply of jade ran out, old pieces were divided to make new ones, perhaps to bury with a dead chief.
Kunz did not call it Olmec: the style had no name yet. Hermann Beyer first used the word “Olmecan” in 1927, in a review of Blom and La Farge’s report. Karl Taube counts it among the strangely carved axe heads that early collectors acquired before Frans Blom and Oliver La Farge tied the Olmec style to a region in 1925; Marshall Saville wrote about it in 1929, the year he published a far more detailed account of the Olmec style and where it was found.
Why carve an axe?
Among the Olmec, Taube writes, jade axes were bound up with maize and the fertility of the fields. Axes cleared the brush to prepare land for planting, and the main crop of the Middle Formative Olmec was maize, whose ear looks like a jade axe in shape and colour. Polished axes were probably also the usual form in which jade was traded, because the polish shows the colour and flaws of the stone and the thin edges show how translucent it is; statues and jewels were carved from them. The jadeite came from the central Motagua valley in eastern Guatemala, as far as is known the only source in Mesoamerica. Many incised jade axes carry the Olmec maize god.
Read next
- Next in Olmec symbolsOlmec maize godThe Olmec god of maize: a head whose cleft crown sprouts an ear of corn, with almond eyes slanting up at the outer corners. Peter David Joralemon called him God II. He is the earliest known maize god of Mesoamerica, and the Maya maize god inherits his face.
- The same shape in Crystal and gemstone loreTurquoiseTurquoise is a sky-blue to green stone, named “Turkish stone” in medieval French. It is sacred in Navajo (Diné) tradition and was the national stone of Persia, and from the thirteenth century European lapidaries said it saved its wearer from falls.
See also
Olmec colossal heads, Were-jaguar, Olmec dragon (earth monster), La Venta Altar 4, Las Limas figure.
Sources
- Ceremonial Ax (“Kunz Ax”) (The Met collection record), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record 722141, American Museum of Natural History 30/7552 (Internet Archive copy, 13 June 2025), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, label and object details
- Gems and Precious Stones of North America (George Frederick Kunz, 1890), George Frederick Kunz, Gems and Precious Stones of North America (New York: Scientific Publishing Company, 1890), via the Internet Archive, Internet Archive (University of California Libraries copy), title page; pp. 278–280
- Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks: Introduction (Karl A. Taube), Karl A. Taube, Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks, Pre-Columbian Art at Dumbarton Oaks no. 2, revised digital edition, introduction, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (Harvard University), introduction
- La jadeíta y la cosmovisión de los olmecas (Karl A. Taube, Arqueología Mexicana), Karl A. Taube, “La jadeíta y la cosmovisión de los olmecas”, Arqueología Mexicana no. 87, pp. 43–48, Arqueología Mexicana (Editorial Raíces / INAH), article text, caption and author note
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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