Jade, Large Alpine axeheads of the European Neolithic

Famous for its exceptional toughness and its aesthetic qualities, jadeite-jade is a precious rock. From 5300 BC, the first Neolithic farmers to colonise the area exploited this rock in the Italian Alps, producing long polished axeheads and disc-rings of incomparable quality. These rare and luxurious objects, reserved for elite use, possessed an extraordinary social value.

Offered, consecrated or sacrificed to supernatural Powers, these social signifiers of identity and status figured in the grave goods of the God-kings buried under the gigantic mounds in the region of Carnac, Brittany. Along with other valuables imported from a long distance – jewellery made of intense green variscite and axeheads made from opalescent fibrolite, both from Spain – jade was integrated within a set of religious practices which took place around the Gulf of Morbihan. The success of these beliefs is illustrated by the spread of the practice of erecting standing stones, and of the architecture of stelae, over western Europe during the second half of the 5th millennium.

After spending eight years in the mountains and in European museums on the trail of jades, two researchers from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique succeeded in identifying the origin of the phenomenon: in the Monte Viso massif, 70 km south-west of Turin, jades had been extracted by means of fire-setting, during summer expeditions up to an altitude of 2400 m. This discovery enabled the researchers to clarify details of an extraordinary social and ideological system: the Europe of Jade. Religious ideology and social inequalities drove the transfer of precious jade items over incredible distances, up to 1800 km as the crow flies, across an area stretching from Malta and Denmark and from the Atlantic to the Black Sea.

This film presents the history of this research, which began in 1984 with ethnoarchaeological work in New Guinea and which continues to this day, with the new discoveries of evidence for Neolithic axehead production in the Swiss Alps at altitudes of 2500 to 2900 m.