 I think it's probably time, so we would like to welcome you to our wonderful Neo-Jay session. Very excited and I'm personally an English class soul, so we're immensely looking forward to hear all your papers because we're very committed to bringing together the narrative about the jades all around the world, the prehistoric jades. So some very lovely jade access to get us in the mood here. So, please join us, my very important fellow organizer Lester, you all know him of course. So here summarize the points to really bring together what is the world-wide jade-in-jade-like minerals. And of course there's various uses for them, they can be tools or whether they're functional or not, that is of course the incredibly interesting question. And adornments or other carved objects. And of course it's generally believed that there are many ages of entanglement and this is why we archaeologists are so obsessed with them. Well people of the past might not necessarily have formulated that way, but for them it's incredibly important those particular physical and visual characteristics and of course the fact that it's so incredibly difficult to get hold of as we all know. So that all added to the value that people gave to it in the past. So and we want to look by bringing together presentations from all over the world. We want to bring this new pattern and really push forward the research and looking at many different aspects and this is why I love it that there is some very technical papers as well as with the social value kind of papers. So anything from quarrying, exploitation, distribution, production, the whole channel paratoire, the social-political value and also how that actually matters. What is the impact of the societies at the time? So I think it's also important to say that although we are focusing on the Jade, I think that some of the problems that we discuss is also general problems within raw material studies of certain points. So we're also very pleased that there are other scholars who are going to talk about marble and also people like Xs and so we're working for them. Yeah, so it needs Jade and Jade-like and even completely contrasting kind of stones. It's also very interesting. So what we're going to talk about later, of course these are also kind of taken from our introduction. So what is actually the impact that the Jade has in historic societies and also how it brings about the changes and very important of course the whole organisation that is involved with the euthanised factors of the Jade. So it's very interesting to see if the reaction to this is the same everywhere and maybe it actually depends on the development of the society or the region or the time scale that we're talking about because of course change over time is also a very important aspect. So yeah, what happens? Do we get special places where people come together? These hubs and will there actually be special rituals that also may have an impact on changing society? That is a very, very important aspect. And this is where we're very interested. We're all talking about Jade, but what if our assumption is wrong and it's not necessarily just the Jade that everybody was crazy about? So I've already heard some hints that some people will say, well, so I'm very looking forward to that, to those papers. And now, of course, very, very important, we need to make sure that we have before we can even start the discussion on the theory and the social value. Of course, we have to be really, really certain on our methodology for the provenance and of course the social and archaeological context. So yes, we're going to look also at the very technical sites, petrographic, geochemical. Shenapa, obviously, is incredibly important. So these these aspects, of course, all come together. That's why it's very, very nice that we have various approaches, particularly with the Caribbean, we're going to have full range of approaches there, which is very, very promising. So that's OK. So just a thing about the terminology of Jade, Jade is an old terminology. And it actually consists of two different minerals. The jadeiteite, which is a rare source worldwide. It's harder, and the chemical composition is a bit different to the other used terminology within Jade, namely the lithite and trimulite, which is more common and a bit more soft and it has a different chemical composition. So and the hardness is also a little bit different. The gravity is different on these jadeiteite and lithite. And what's particularly interesting when we go deeper into it is that you can see that the crystals here in the jadeiteite is more interlocked. So it's a much tougher material. It's much harder to break compared to the lithite. And of course the color is sometimes similar, but it has variation. And the use of the jadeiteite is of course also worldwide, both in Europe and Asia, but also in the Caribbean. And lithite is also common in many places in the world. So shall I see the distribution map? So here you see the distribution map of the jadeiteite. And normally we see three different places of the jadeiteite where there has been studies of jadeiteite and the network of it and also prominence analysis. The first one is in the Caribbean. We're going to hear more about that later. And then of course there's Europe. It has been a huge study by Peter Carr and his team. And that's almost over. But they're still in the process of doing more analysis. And then there's a new area, which is the eastern Mediterranean, which I'm going to talk about, opening up. And then we have in the Asian part, especially in Japan, but also in China, where there are extensive studies as well going on. And then we have the Nephrite sources, as you can see, they're more common. And I mean, not in all these places we see use of Nephrite, but in many, many places. Unfortunately, some of the sources, I mean, in general Nephrite and jadeiteite, you know some of the sources, but we certainly don't know all of them. So there's plenty to do in the future there. We have our work cut out for us here. So some of the questions that we will be actually asking also in the discussion, we all know that there's special characteristics that they have. It's tough. It's really hard to work. The color, especially green, is a color that's very often used when it comes to jadeite. And I think I'm very curious to see if this is worldwide the case. Of course, extremely scarce, all adding to the value. And very often the interpretations, well, the interpretations are always items of symbol, items of power, of prestige, items of network. But I think it's interesting to ask the question mark. To what extent is that the case? Because in many cases it's based on modern ethnographic studies, for example. And also in many cases, for example, the jades, the jade axis in Europe and also a lot of the jades in Japan that I will be talking about, there's something based on a few very well-known, very well-published cases. And all the rest, the cases that are not so spectacular, just kind of pushed under the rug somewhere. So I think this is a very interesting question. To what extent? And what do we see and what do we think about that? So this is our session program. First, we will have Irene. Irene will be talking, making a small comparison between Chinese and European jade and mostly speak about the Chinese nephrite. Then we have Sebastia talking about the Caribbean. Then Alice will give us a very wonderful metallurgical chemical characterization. After that, Caspar. So we have mostly in our first half, we have a lot of Caribbean, as you can see. And then Caspar and Alice again. Alice is making us happy with two wonderful presentations today. Then, because one of the papers is missing, we have actually quite some time for questions and a little bit of discussion already. So and also if you run over a little bit, it's not a really big disaster. So one of the papers fell out. So we have half an hour before the coffee break to discuss, have questions, and also if there's little points that you want to point out more that you didn't really have time for in your presentation just yet. And then after the break, first there will be Tom. He will be talking a lot from use-ware analysis on access in the Caribbean. Personally, very much like before it's this. Then I'll be talking about the Japanese prehistoric jades, which are not Neolithic, but before Neolithic. And then we will have the team talking about the marble. And after that, and I have to pick this very clear in the program, this was a stop gap. My name was put as author. I am very emphatically not the author. I just did this to make sure because of EAA rules being very, very critical. So I am definitely not. So instead of Bernadini, Manuela is presenting. She's a supervisor, right? Yeah, so she will be presenting. I'm not author. They are the author very much. So about the jade in Caput Agri. And then finally, we have Lasse talking about this wonderful new research in the East Mediterranean and the ecstatic and how that all distributed and circulated. And then we have quite a lot of time for final questions. We can address the points that we just said. But we can hopefully also discuss avenues for future collaborations, future research, and other pathways. I think this is for our final discussion slide, right? Yeah. Yeah. So these are the things to just structure it. We will get back to this slide for discussion. I'll get a little bit bother with this. Then people would know how you facilitate them. The final discussion. So first of all, as we were talking about the methodology, I mean, that's very important because otherwise, we won't get any further with the excellent interpretation. So discussion of methodology is very important. And people have been trying to solve that in different ways, using different methods. And of course, there's always also the discussion of using destruction versus non-destructive methods and also using the stationary methods and the mobile methods, what are the ups and downs and what is the negative side with that. And then, yeah, so that's the main methodological part. And then for the interpretation. Yeah. After the interpretation, what do we know, and how do we know it, and what do we think we know about it? So very interesting, why did people bother with going for the jades? Is it some secret accessibility, some secret knowledge? Is it the people that they know very much today? Is it some kind of big methodological framework that this is a resource of the gods? You can't hoard it. That would be really rude. So somehow you have to give access to other people's, other groups of people's as well. And of course, who was behind it? What level of social organization was behind it? And does that actually make a difference? For example, there could be theoretically a huge difference between my prehistoric Jomon people who were relatively egalitarian and then the later nihilistic of China, which very much was not egalitarian, so to speak. So to what extent are all these kinds of things relevant? And finally, incredibly important is jade resources. They're an incredibly important cultural resource. And it has to be protected. How to protect it? Because some of them are really fragile. And also, how to publish the stuff without being too specific, because there will be rock hounds and people wandering around destroying some of these really fragile prairie insides around the world. In some countries, it's really, really bad in Burma, for example. It's incredibly bad in Guatemala. It's an industry.