It's long been known that the Maya had long-distance trade with places as distant as Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, but now evidence has been found that proves there was a Maya trade link with the Caribbean too.

Jade axe blades found on Antigua have been matched to Maya jade sources in the Motagua valley of Guatemala some 1700 miles to the west, which were only discovered following flooding from Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Although jade has been found before in the West Indies, its source was unknown; none of the known sources of jade prior to the discovery of the Motagua source matched the axe blades.

The axes have been dated to between 250-500 CE, which corresponds with the Classic Maya civilisation. It's likely that rather than the Maya coming to the Caribbean, the Caribbean islanders of the Saladoid culture, who used large dugout canoes similar to those Columbus encountered a millennium later off the coast of Honduras, sailed to the Maya.

-----------------------------------------------

[Information comes from an article in Canadian Mineralogist Volume 44, Number 2, April 2006: Pre-Columbian jadeite axes from Antigua, West Indies: description and possible sources, by G.E. Harlow, A.R. Murphy, D.J. Hozjan, C.N. De Mille and A.A. Levinson. An abstract of the paper is available online here.]