A general term for a precious stone from which jewellery and other decorative work may be made. The word jade is today applied to two minerals, nephrite and jadeite, which often look similar: greenish in colour, hard and translucent. Although sometimes found in prehistoric Europe and other areas, the two regions where the working of jade was most highly developed are China and Mesoamerica. China. Only nephrite was worked in China before the 18th century ad; Chinese texts however refer to any similar hardstone worked by the same techniques as yu ‘jade’. Because of its hardness, 6.5 on the Mohs scale, nephrite can be cut, shaped and polished only with abrasives. This quintessentially Neolithic technology was already well developed in China in the 4th millennium BC; the slow but steady improvement of technique that can be seen in Shang and Zhou jades led eventually to an easy mastery of three-dimensional sculpture in the Han period. At that time the major source of Chinese nephrite was Turkestan; textual evidence to identify the sources exploited in earlier periods is lacking. At least as early as the 4th millennium bc polished jades were typical mortuary offerings in graves of the east-coast Neolithic cultures (see Longshan, sense 2), making their first appearance at sites like Qinglian’GANg and Beiyinyangying. Some of these mortuary jades are ornaments, others are replicas of tools such as axes or harvesting knives; a few common shapes (bi, zong) lack obvious prototypes. The jade shapes copied from tools often depart considerably from the proportions of their functional prototypes, their cutting edges are often unsharpened, and signs of wear are usually absent; it is no doubt safe to assume that objects made in this valuable material, which was probably imported over long distances, served ritual and mortuary purposes above all. The same is evidently true of the refined versions of the Neolithic shapes executed by Bronze Age Shang craftsmen, who added to the repertoire a few shapes copying metal objects (seeGE). In the Western Zhou period, however, inscriptions on bronze ritual vessels mention jades as gifts bestowed by the king in ceremonies of investiture, showing that these cult objects had been diverted to play a role in feudal transactions, a shift of function paralleled by the ritual vessels themselves. Jades of the Eastern Zhou period, surpassingly fine in design, were often used for personal adornment, but even at this late stage the mortuary associations of jade remained strong. Han texts recommend powdered jade as an elixir of immortality, and jade burial suits like those found at Mancheng were believed to prevent decomposition. The Americas. A variety of materials collectively described as jade were coveted for luxury items by groups in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Shades of blue and green were especially favoured; its symbolic meaning was water, and hence the source of life itself. Probably the most renowned workers of jade were the Olmec, but it was a valued commodity in the trade networks of all the major cultures of Mesoamerica (the Maya, Teotihuacan, Toltec, Aztecs etc). A comparative scarcity of raw material sources meant an increasing premium on the material with the passing of time, and early pieces were frequently rewórked or maintained as heirlooms. Some scholars suggest that indigenous sources were so few that they could not possibly have met demand; they argue for trans-Pacific contact, with the ultimate origin of some jade being China.
The Macmillan dictionary of archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983Copied