 doing a research on Jade for a long time on a very archaeological point of view and I'm slowly starting to collaborate with the geologists. So this for me is also a new starting point of my research. I also am very interested in getting into user analysis, which is why I'm going to pick Tom's brain a lot after this session. But just to see, the interesting thing is that the geomorphs are hunter-gatherers. They're quite complex hunter-gatherers with little, easy-easy bits of cultivation thrown in, mostly kind of a beans-like thing, that was not a major staple of their diet. So they're classified as hunter-gatherers. And they're more or less egalitarian, so you don't see a chief of them or you don't see a hierarchy going out. Interestingly, and this is actually a result that's come about through a collaboration with my dear friend Yoshiki Iruka, who's a geologist. Japanese always believe that it's mostly jade tides that's being used, and there are several jade tides sources in Japan, but there's only evidence for one particular source that will explain later that's being used. And actually, some of the jade tides is really gorgeous. It's almost a gem-like quality. This is actually a 5,000-year-old object and it's a pendant. It's classified as a pendant. So, although the Japanese archaeologist always focused on the jade tides, my friend Yoshiki has actually looked at some axes, or cells, axes, edges, both types, and he found that the axes that had been classified as serpentinite are actually nephrite. So you see almost like a reversal of the Caribbean situation, where the jade tides is used for adornment, and the nephrite is in many cases used for functional woodworking tools, which is very intriguing. So, as I said, this is just my ongoing journey in which I actually challenge some really entrenched ideas in Japanese archaeology, because there are some very, very spectacular cases, for example, of jades found in burials, and what happens very often, that takes over the narrative. The really, really special cases take over the narrative. And I'm extremely interested to just look also at the other depositional contexts that are otherwise thrown under the rug. And I'm also very interested in the gradations of value, because you have, as I showed you before, the really, really gorgeous jade. But then again, there's also much less gorgeous jade, which is also used in similar objects. I'm just going to give these a wrap. Here is a water-worn paddle of jade time from the specific source area I'm going to talk about later. A water-worn paddle of nephrite. Very nice looking nephrite, in fact. This is a copy I had made right in the car that I had made of about 8 centimeter long pendants, but you actually have longer ones. So I'm just going to pass those around. Feel how heavy the jade is. And that's not even the biggest one. So I'm incredibly interested. I started out with these jades from my PhD research. I was very interested in the length of their use, whether they were heirlooms or much, much shorter. And my hypothesis that I wanted to prove at a later stage is they were actually, in some cases, used over a very long time, generations, generations, passed on until their final end of their biography, their position. That might involve different changes in society, in beliefs, for example. But I was also intrigued. Everybody just classifies them automatically. It has a whole. Therefore, it's a pendant. Hooray, we have an adornment here. And I was actually thinking, hold on a moment. Can we 100% sure that it's just that, exclusively only a pendant? And of course, yeah, I'm very interested in how intensively they were used, because can you imagine this is a prehistorian hunter-gatherer society with no use of metals whatsoever? And of course, it cost them forever to make these. And also the idea of was it actually owned by a person, like a leader that Japanese archaeologists are quite fond of saying? Or was it actually more of a communal owned object? So this is the area, and I'll show you a bit clearer later. There's a specific area called Itoigawa. This is a slide I've worked with my friend Yoshi. And the star is where the source of the jade is found. It's high in the mountains, but it's actually broken down and it flows down to the beach, where you can actually pick them up. But we see here that the reds are the jade production sites. They're very well known, where they also produce serpentinite, which now turn out to be very often, and the nephrite axis. And the nephrite axis is the source of nephrite, so the white dots are actually nephrites. And this is actually ongoing research of Yoshi, and he's still working on this. And we find that he finds that there's actually quite a broad distribution of these nephrite axis, which seem to be functional, functionally used. So this is high up in the mountains. Here we have the source of the jade, and you can see some of those blocks are pretty big. Later on, in our discussion, we'll get to the preservation and heritage management aspect of everything. Well, this is the jadeite coast. It's very, very beautiful. You know, even nowadays, you can actually go there and pick up pieces of jadeite if you're very, very lucky. And actually, they've kind of weaponized this now for tourism, that they actually really, really try to get people to come there and pick their own jades. So, of course, local governments love weaponizing these things to get more tourists. Again, a management issue. The first discovery that we know of so far of the jade being actually used as an artifact is already 7,000 years ago. And that was actually at Itoigawa site very, very close by. It was used as a hammerstone. So that's a very, very first use. But after that, 6,000 years ago, we find something that was on its way of becoming a pendant. Look, there's a really, really good quality. This was found at the Sheldon site, but interestingly, not in a barrier or something. It was just spread all over the site. But the first known finished pendant that we know of, it's about 5 centimeters, is actually found in a burial. And it's found quite far away. It's found in one of the most mountainous areas in the basin, the mountainous area, which is about 150 kilometers away. So it's already circulating at that point. So these are the... This is also a very, very unpleasant area to live, because it's very isolated. Even today, now they made a big highway so people can actually come. And during the making of the big highway, this is when they discover these sites because they're really, really... You have this very narrow strip between very deep sea, Japan Sea, or East Sea as the Koreans call it. And then there's really, really tall mountains. And the climate is particularly bad because there's a lot of precipitation in summer and winter. And especially if you happen to be ahead together, it's not necessarily the easiest and most comfortable place in Japan that you could pick out. There are nicer places to live in Japan. So that's very interesting, but they do have permanent settlements there where they are actually producing both the jades and the axes. And I was... My thesis, I hypothesized that they actually really chose to live there and sort of entangled themselves with other communities through gift giving. And then, of course, having this major... How can you call this obligation from the others that they gave it to? That ensured that they could call whatever they needed, and perhaps even marriage partners. Because obviously one big problem that you have is if you get completely isolated, you have too small a community. And that leads obviously to very practical problems. So this is my friend Yoshi, and again a courtesy of him. He's the one who's done the really, really exciting research. I'm afraid I can't tell you too much about it, not being a geologist myself. But yeah, he's got his handheld system, I think, and I really hope to get to meet him sometime. And he's used these to sort of test these axes and to his great surprise, he found that rather a lot of them that have been classified as completely different, he's left right. So yeah, he's sampled several sites and it's an ongoing process and sometimes I'm accompanying him and doing the research. And we're hoping to... We're about to work on a joint article in English because he's published this, but in a really, really small paper in Japanese and it's very, very difficult to get hold of, let alone read, even for me. So there actually are some jaded type axes, but very obviously they're in sort of a different league. Very often they have a kind of hole through them, they're extremely, extremely rare. And yeah, I'm really intrigued to see how that goes. There's very little known about it. One of the best-known ones is actually completely without a context of providence. But yes, they do seem to be found slightly more often in a certain area either on the house floor or in the field. What is most common and the most research is concentrated on is these pendants. So especially Kijima sensei, and I'm hoping that he's going to tutor me in the production techniques of how you make the jade. So this is the area. So you can see this is a very isolated area on the Pansea coast, big mountains, but it actually tends to spread out from there. So history has constructed some of the techniques. And very intriguingly, some of the holes suggest you can see this little stub here. Some of the drills may have been hollow. Maybe not all of them, but we have evidence that the drills they use were often hollow. So it's really intriguing because they didn't have bamboo yet. Not the bamboo that we know of now. It wasn't introduced yet. But even in the early Jomon now, we took about 5,000 years ago. This is the source area. And here are three of the major big hubs, not all of them, but three major big hubs that I actually looked at in terms of how these jade pendants are actually being found and how they're being used and what their perception of their use is. This is a very famous site, Sanai Maruyama. They're now going to push for it to become World Heritage. I think they've been approved, right, by the Japanese government. That is their next World Heritage application that Japan is going to make. So this is in the mountain area where the first jade was also found, the pendant. This is the Tokyo area, and this is all the way up in Aomori. It's three different places. And I was intrigued to see that actually the use of the wire that's found is actually quite different. This is what these jades look like in the phase of, say, 6,000 to 4,500 years ago, roughly speaking. And it's quite variable, but it's also quite big. They're quite big and chunky. So I was intrigued by the fact that they're very, very visible. But also there's quite a spread. It's not, you know, homogeneous shaping. You have some shapes that are sort of similar, but combined with the appearance of the jade, I could pretty much say all of them are somehow unique. So I was intrigued. In a later phase, the use completely changes because you have really, really tiny ones and you have an assemblage of the jades into one necklace, for example. And that's when you also start finding them mostly in burials, especially in the north of Japan. And some people have connected that that maybe this is when they start to have some minor social differentiation in the latent final genome. And also they start depicting them in these clay figurines. You can see the little necklaces. In Japan they really, really love concentrating in, for example, museum. They really, really love concentrating on the fact that they're sometimes found in burials and that they're sort of connected to important life experiences. This is from a Niigata prefectural history. Museum, a very nice reconstruction of the Rebun Funadomari site. Very beautiful jade in a very outlying island and with an elderly gentleman. But unfortunately that sort of started dominating the narrative. And I would have to stifle a chuckle because it's a very famous archaeologist dealing with jades. And his English translation is not quite the same as his Japanese translation. He says that the Japanese says the people who wore the large pendants. But the English translation that was supplied in the, you know, in the content of the journal says the man who wore large jade. That's a bit of a Freudian slip, or is it? So in reality we only know four cases of large jades that actually found in burials where the bones remain. It depends very on volcanic, very acidic soil. So bones don't have much chance of surviving. But in some cases they do in shell middens. And so we have some cases. The intriguing thing is that half of them are men and half of them are women. I'm not quite sure this is jade dyed. So I would love, it might be nephrite or another material. This might also be something. It's a green stone which was apparently locally valued in a similar way. So this is the interesting thing. Now when I go on these three places that I outlined before, the Alpine Mountain area, the Tokyo Bay area, the Flat area, and then the northernmost area if I contrast these with each other. So we have the burial pits from the known ones. Most of them, of course, we have not a clue. There's somewhere in the collection we haven't got a clue, or that we just, we don't know. But we have some from burial pits, some house pits, some from the special deposition area. That could be a refuse heap that was still had some ritual overtones, or it could be actually really a ritual deposition area. We also have most of them actually are from the cultural layer or a shell layer without a structural context. That's actually most of them. They tend to forget about that. A part of some, the only place where you actually do find them mostly in the burials is actually the Central Mountain Alpine area. This is the place where you do find more often in the burials. But those tend to be slightly later in that first phase. So I was wondering whether that actually signaled a change in social value. Maybe something happened in society and they started being deposited. This is something that I want to investigate through the USWATC. Have they actually been used for a very long time before they got into those burials? And what does it actually potentially say about changing society? Because this was a time where there was a very big population explosion. So I can imagine that the resources must have become a bit straight. And we all know what people do when they're rather desperate. They start, you know, consecrating or sacrificing precious things. So I don't know, intrigue. This is something I'm wanting to look at more. But even with the burials, they're found very centrally in the place. So in a sense, they're still among the living. The dead and the living are sort of very close to each other. So I find that very intriguing also with the fact that they also tend to have beautiful ritual figurines and all of that set together. So I think there's a very interesting inter-mixture there between the living and the dead in the ritual and the profane, so to speak. So that's also an aspect. But I feel go just a few hundred kilometers out of the mountains into the plains of Tokyo. Plains is relative, we have a lot of hills there still. But then all of a sudden we find, look at that, only 70-15% is found in burials. It's completely different. Well, social value, you might say. So most of them you actually also found just in the borders of the site. So you find them in the borders of the settlement site. That's very, very important. Or in shell middens when you go closer to the coast. But they're not really, that you think like, okay, they've been very deliberately left here. Because very few of them are actually on house floors. Also the shape is very different if you may see. Also again, lots and lots of ritual stuff going on there. And this is the final example. This is the one where you actually find them in a ritual deposit. So this is a place where lots of other objects got sacrificed. They're very beautiful. There's only one found in a burial. But together with these other objects, they're all found in two different ritual deposits. So something completely different is going on there. So we see three different areas and three different uses. So this is why I want the caution to be, especially for technical archaeologists, not to be too generic with interpretations because it varies to diamond through space. So now of course I want to know a little bit more about what it actually means. So this is why I want to know more about use swear. And yeah, I thought they start out in circulation as gifts for the intercommunal relations. But at some point, I think because there's so precious, probably most perhaps have been handed down through generations, which is something I need to confirm. It's just my hypothesis. And that it really connected people with their ancestors. And the fact that they're always buried, even if they're buried, they're so still in the center of the village, is my clue that they're connected to the people. They're really connected to people as a mnemonic device, so to speak, to connect them mythologically with the place where they live. But yeah, is it sacrificial, consequential? But it could also be that completely wrong and society changes and all of a sudden somebody does say, yeah, this is mine. Thank you very much. So again, this is something I have to work on. So now I'm going to, in future, work on knowing the use swear analysis. I'm going to soap your pinkie ray. Also I've already started doing some silicon impressions and so this is the questions that we really invested in about the length. And now I have to also really realize how do you produce these things? Because that might have major constraints to the shape, for example. Something that I think might have been delivered because of a mythological or mental construct may just be related to technique. I don't know. I need to learn about this. And also, again, what Tom was saying about reshaping and making the mule, that's very intriguing. I did notice, if you can see, there's huge differences. For example, well, the thing I'm wearing, for example, which is just, and this one there, gem quality, but also really, really unattractive ones. So I'm really interested in what kind of characteristics are relating to that. See, as you can see, close up. I thought it was burnt. My friend Josie told me, no, that's just what the j is. That's the quality of it. So there's huge reliability. There's also my question, what is this hole? Was that truly just for suspending something? Is that what it is? Because when I started looking at the suspension, this is the expectation, and this is actually what it looks like. So instead of looking like this, it looks like this. So it's not quite as ornamental as you would assume it is. Also, I noticed that they have always at least one flat side that you can actually put things down. And I'm very intrigued if that's intentional. So this is really a shape of sight, and I want to know if they... First, all of them. I started looking at this in summer, and all of them can sort of be put on their side. So you can lay them down, you can hang them, and you can sort of set them on their sides for the sort of, yeah. And that was, that was all over, right? All of east of Japan. So yeah, I need to find out more about this, and I want to do this through user analysis amongst other things. Whether, yeah, the gradations of value, also whether that's, it's a variability, regional variability, for example. Because I think, yeah, regional and temporal variability are immensely important aspects in this. And yes, in some cases, I'm also very intrigued to see, jade is very hard. So to what extent can I see the use where trace is? For example, here, maybe you can see a little bit. I can see some rings also on the silicone, which indicate to me that I have to check, but that's actually the drilling technique. And that is actually a trace that remains, which intrigued. This one, really, really beautiful jade, that doesn't have those rings, is that because it was used over such a long time, that the drill holes were, you know, erased, it braided away. This is what I want to know, you see. On the other hand, maybe it's just the technology of how they made them, also the flat side that you can set them on. Maybe that's just related to technology. That's how they made them. So these are the questions I'm dealing with, and thank you very much for your attention.