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Bats and beaked birds, plaques and pendants, and even jade inserts and fillings for the teeth, club heads, ear ornaments, lip and nose plugs, and almost any other object imaginable were produced by the thousands. All of it perished in the sudden onslaught of a foreign culture. The subsequent poverty and prostration of all the native cultures erased a good part of what was left—even the memories.
Another Stone Age culture began to develop the use of jade at some unknown time after settlement of the two islands of New Zealand about A.D. 1000. The Maoris found jade there and promptly put it to use for work purposes. They needed good knives, hatchets, and fish hooks above all else and had little thought of making ornaments until much later. Then, these tools themselves became the first amulets. A curious and strangely contorted human figure—the Hei-tiki—with cocked head, lopsided eyes, and bowed legs, was also worn as a pendant. It and a few other carved fishhook and serpent forms are just about as far as this jade culture was able to go before the world of the European intruded with the arrival of Captain Cook in 1769. Today jade is cut in New Zealand by descendants of the same people, using power tools and carborundum drills, not the primitive tools of their ancestors and loose diamonds.
All over the world the age of the jade cultures is finished. Now it is just another art form pursued by collectors and connoisseurs. Even so, the strong attraction of this beautiful and magic stone persists. One can judge it by the sudden scarcity of raw jade and by the escalating prices of the finished carvings of quality in the market place.

Utilitarian jade was still in evidence up to the end of Aztec times. Jade wedges, spears, axes, and knives, like those made in the earliest times, remained in use right up to the sixteenth century. Central America never really moved from the stone age to the metal age. Metal drills and metal tools were never used for jade-carving chores. As a matter of fact, even the rotary drill—extensively used—never was perfected beyond the simplest twirling of a hollow bamboo reed between the hands.
With bamboo reed, wood polishers, and abrasives of quartz sand, crushed jade, garnet, and hematite, the New World carvers managed to produce a marvelous assemblage of objects. Figures of gods, such as Kinich Ahau, the Sun God; Xolotl, the horrifying guide for the dead through the underworld; and the winged serpent god were three of many. Jaguar and skull carvings were typical examples of a tendency to accentuate the terrifying and grotesque. Ceremonial axe gods, roughly in the shape of an axe blade, had the upper half carved in a figure and the lower part in a curved blade.