[Aztlan] Jade and language travelled together

[Mario Cabrejos]

Jade and language travelled together
Skilled jade craftsmen may have helped to spread the Austronesian languages.
Katharine Sanderson 
Published online 19 November 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2007.268 
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/071119/full/news.2007.268.html

Prehistoric purveyors of jade spread their trade from a single Taiwanese source throughout a huge area of Southeast Asia, possibly bringing Austronesian languages with them.
>From as early as 3000 BC people from Southeast Asia used jade to make tools and ornaments.

COMMENTS

  a.. The aesthetic dimension of this is fascinating- while the steel-like durability of jadeite and nephrite may have justified long range trade in neolithic cultures in Europe, Asia and Mesoamerica, ear rings are not celts or shipwright's adzes. The contemporary mining of jadeite in Japan and its trade into Korea as fabricated magatama jewels would seem to be a parallel, as is the export of 'Olmec blue' jade from Guatemala to the Eastern Caribbean and Costa Rica in Formative and Maya times. 

    a.. 20 Nov, 2007 
    b.. Posted by: Russell Seitz 

  a.. I would suggest that the reason the jade workers travelled to their markets is one of "value added", as exporting from source would reduce the workers income, with mark-ups along the supply chain. To maximise their return, the workers would sell direct, and at the same time enhance appreciation of their skills.

    a.. 20 Nov, 2007 
    b.. Posted by: Philip Needham 

  a.. The fact that "northern Vietnam" is closer to the Fengtian jade source/workshop than the Cham homeland in "southern Vietnam" does not detract from the way the jade trade network and the Austronesian diaspora mirror each other. The Cham homeland was in fact in central Vietnam beginning (in historical times) just south of the edge of the Red River delta (Austronesians may indeed have settled on the north Vietnamese coast and played a key role in the emergence of the Austroasiatic proto-Vietnamese culture itself -- "southern Vietnam," if that means the Mekong delta, was apparently ethnically Austroasiatic Khmer in early historical times). Moreover, travel to northern Vietnam from the southern Chinese ports (hence communication between the Chinese empire's northern Vietnamese prefectures and the rest of the empire) was normally via ports on the central Vietnamese ports rather than directly to ones at the mouth of the Red River valley (see the work of Keith Taylor and Li Tana on these points). This discovery only confirms that what we separate as "East Asian" and "Southeast Asian" histories form a seemless whole.

    a.. 21 Nov, 2007 
    b.. Posted by: Andrew Abalahin