The Production and Circulation of Alpine Jade Axeheads

Around 5600 BCE, the first Mediterranean Neolithic colonists located sources of Alpine jades (eclogites, omphacitites, and jadeitites) in the southwestern Italian Alps. This sixth-millennium use of one of the toughest rocks for manufacturing stone axeheads constitutes the origin of an extraordinary technical, economic, and ideological system of the European Neolithic: the Europe of Jade. From 5300 BCE, these axeheads—some of them used as tools for felling trees and working wood, while others were super-sized ‘signifier objects’—circulated around Europe over distances up to 1,800 km as the crow flies, their distribution stretching from Malta to Denmark and from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. The authors propose to analyse the ways in which these mountain jades were exploited at heights between 800 m and 2,400 m above sea level. This exploitation underpinned one of the most original social and religious systems in the European Neolithic between 4700 and 3600 BCE.