Despite myriad challenges, clinicians see room for progress.
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Edited by Robert D. Drennan, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, and approved October 5, 2007 (received for review August 3, 2007)
Abstract
We have used electron probe microanalysis to examine Southeast Asian nephrite (jade) artifacts, many archeologically excavated, dating from 3000 B.C. through the first millennium A.D. The research has revealed the existence of one of the most extensive sea-based trade networks of a single geological material in the prehistoric world. Green nephrite from a source in eastern Taiwan was used to make two very specific forms of ear pendant that were distributed, between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D., through the Philippines, East Malaysia, southern Vietnam, and peninsular Thailand, forming a 3,000-km-diameter halo around the southern and eastern coastlines of the South China Sea. Other Taiwan nephrite artifacts, especially beads and bracelets, were distributed earlier during Neolithic times throughout Taiwan and from Taiwan into the Philippines.
Footnotes
- bTo whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: hung{at}coombs.anu.edu.au
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Author contributions: H.-C.H. and Y.I. designed research; H.-C.H., Y.I., P.B., K.D.N., B.B., P.S., E.D., R.S., I.D., and J.H.M. performed research; H.-C.H., Y.I., P.B., K.D.N., B.B., P.S., E.D., R.S., and I.D. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; Y.I. analyzed data; and H.-C.H., Y.I., and P.B. wrote the paper.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
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k Jade is a term used in the broad sense of a hard and shiny stone, applied to two monomineralic rocks termed jadeitite and nephrite in gemology and geology. Both jadeitite and nephrite occur in metamorphic rocks, but their chemical compositions are different. Jadeitite is composed of jadeite (sodium clinopyroxene), whereas nephrite is composed of tremolite and/or actinolite (calcium amphibole). All studied Neolithic and Iron Age jade artifacts from Taiwan, the Philippines, and Vietnam are of nephrite.
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↵ l A double animal-headed pendant was found in place on the skull of a burial at Giong Ca Vo in southern Vietnam. ref. 2, Fig. 29.1. In the 1940s, American archaeologist H. Otley Beyer noted that some of the jade ear pendants he encountered in the Batangas area were similar in shape to the metal pendants worn ethnographically by the Ifugao, Bontoc, and Kalinga peoples in the Northern Luzon Cordillera region, who termed them lingling-o. The term is now used widely to refer to a general class of earrings with projections, but in this article, with Fox (3), we refer only to the specific three-pointed form in jade.
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This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0707304104/DC1.
- © 2007 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
Ancient jades map 3,000 years of prehistoric exchange in Southeast Asia
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- Anthropology
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