The use of fire opal in central Mexico predates the European arrival by several centuries. Pre-Columbian artisans in the Toltec and Aztec spheres knew the stone, mined it from the volcanic deposits of what are now the states of Queretaro and Hidalgo, and carved it into ornamental and ritual objects. The Nahuatl name recorded by colonial chroniclers is vitzitziltecpatl, glossed as the hummingbird stone, a reference both to the iridescent body colour and to a perceived association with the bird.

The earliest direct documentation in European sources comes from the sixteenth century. Bernardino de Sahagun's Florentine Codex, compiled in Nahuatl and Spanish in the years following the conquest, includes descriptions of precious stones used by indigenous lapidaries, with a category of fiery transparent stones that scholars have associated with the fire opal of central Mexico. Sahagun's informants describe stones that change colour with the angle of view and that reflect the warmth of the sun, language consistent with the play of colour and saturated body colour seen in Queretaro material.

Archaeological evidence supplements the textual record. Inlays of fire opal have been recovered from late post-Classic period contexts in central Mexico, including small mosaic pieces and beads. The Penn Museum and the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City both hold Aztec-period objects in which fire opal has been identified, although attribution must be made carefully because the stone can be confused with other warm-coloured silicates and resins. The trade in fire opal seems to have moved through the Aztec tribute system from the volcanic interior toward Tenochtitlan, where it joined turquoise, jadeite and shell as a material reserved for ceremonial and elite use.

The colonial fortunes of the stone are mixed. Spanish chroniclers noted the existence of the deposits but did not develop them on the scale of silver, and the stone disappears from European jewellery commerce until the nineteenth century, when systematic mining at Magdalena in Jalisco brought Mexican fire opal into the international market. The reopening of the Queretaro mines in the 1870s coincided with a wider Victorian fashion for opal, and from that point Mexican fire opal entered the catalogues of European houses.

The folkloric attributions surrounding the stone are difficult to verify and need careful handling. Claims that the Aztec elite associated fire opal specifically with the hummingbird god Huitzilopochtli appear in twentieth-century popular literature but rest on thin primary documentation. The most that can be said with confidence is that the stone was prized, that it was named in Nahuatl after the hummingbird, that it appears in the tribute and craft economy of the late pre-conquest period, and that its mining has continued, with interruptions, into the modern era.

For the contemporary trade, the pre-Columbian provenance carries marketing weight without resolving any specific gemmological question. A Queretaro fire opal sold in Toronto today comes from the same volcanic terrain that supplied the Aztec lapidary, and the cultural arc from vitzitziltecpatl through colonial silence to the modern miner is real, if sometimes overstated by retailers.

The stone's stability and its sensitivity to dehydration mean that ancient surviving examples in museum collections are generally protected from prolonged display in dry climates. Reputable institutions maintain humidity controls when fire opal is on view. The historical record, the modern mining industry and the cautions of conservation all converge on the same fact: Mexican fire opal is a long-lived element of central Mexican material culture, and its name in Nahuatl remains the most evocative single piece of evidence for the depth of that tradition.