Art and Language

Jade and language travelled together : Nature News

Jade and language travelled together

Skilled jade craftsmen may have helped to spread the Austronesian languages.

Katharine Sanderson

Lingling-o: jade earings spread throughout Southeast Asia.Image courtesy of PNAS/National Academy of Sciences

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. This
later included ear pendants, such as a three-pointed jade ornament
called a lingling-o. These ornaments have been found in southeastern
Taiwan, and also all the way out to the Philippines, eastern Malaysia,
southern Vietnam, central and southern Thailand, and parts of Cambodia.

Hsiao-Chun
Hung, at the Australian National University in Canberra, and her
colleagues took a close look at lingling-o and other pendants found in
archaeological digs across Southeast Asia, to find out where they came
from.

Rather than focus on the style and patterning on the
ornaments, Hung used an electron probe microscope, which can work out
the elemental composition of each sample without causing any damage.
This is the first time that the technique has been used to look at
jade, says Hung.

Her work shows that 116 of 144 jade
ornaments from across the 3,000-kilometre-wide region came from the
Fengtian jade deposit in eastern Taiwan. The Fengtian samples included
incomplete ornaments and cast-off pieces of jade thought to come from
the manufacturing process, which leads Hung to suggest that the jade
was transported as a raw material. “This of course implies
movement of people and technology,” says Hung. Her findings are
published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ¹

Roaming craftsmen

Hung suggests that the raw jade was carried by a few highly proficient,
but itinerant, jade workers, who would set up camp and carve it into
the lingling-o shapes preferred by the locals.

Finished
ornaments were more commonly dated from 500 BC to 500 AD, when there
was a flurry in trading activity in the region, and so more chance for
a skilled jade worker to travel.

It was already known that obsidian was traded widely across Southeast Asia.

Hung
suggests that this trading carried language with it. Today,
Austronesian languages are spoken by about 350 million people in
Southeast Asia and Oceania. The languages are thought to have started
spreading as a people migrated from Taiwan to the Philippines 4,000
years ago. And the distribution of these languages closely mirrors the
distribution of Fengtian jade, says Hung.

Fengtian jade and the Austronesian Cham
language are both found in southern Vietnam, for example, but not in
northern Vietnam — even though northern Vietnam is closer to the
Fengtian source.

Nicole Boivin, from the Leverhulme Centre for
Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK, says
that although trade was already widespread in this region at the time
in question, using systematic scientific techniques, such as the
electron probe microscope, has allowed Hung and her team to get a more
detailed picture of what is happening.

“It’s
great using scientific methodology to look at this methodically,”
says Boivin, “They have really shown in great detail that
something is going on.”

• 
  

  References

  
  
  1. Hung, H.-C. et al. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA doi 10.1073/pnas.0707304104 (2007).
  
  

Skilled jade craftsmen may have helped to spread the Austronesian languages.

Katharine Sanderson
Lingling-o: jade earings spread throughout Southeast Asia.Lingling-o: jade earings spread throughout Southeast Asia.Image courtesy of PNAS/National Academy of Sciences

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. This later included ear pendants, such as a three-pointed jade ornament called a lingling-o. These ornaments have been found in southeastern Taiwan, and also all the way out to the Philippines, eastern Malaysia, southern Vietnam, central and southern Thailand, and parts of Cambodia.

Hsiao-Chun Hung, at the Australian National University in Canberra, and her colleagues took a close look at lingling-o and other pendants found in archaeological digs across Southeast Asia, to find out where they came from.

Rather than focus on the style and patterning on the ornaments, Hung used an electron probe microscope, which can work out the elemental composition of each sample without causing any damage. This is the first time that the technique has been used to look at jade, says Hung.

Her work shows that 116 of 144 jade ornaments from across the 3,000-kilometre-wide region came from the Fengtian jade deposit in eastern Taiwan. The Fengtian samples included incomplete ornaments and cast-off pieces of jade thought to come from the manufacturing process, which leads Hung to suggest that the jade was transported as a raw material. “This of course implies movement of people and technology,” says Hung. Her findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 1
Roaming craftsmen

Hung suggests that the raw jade was carried by a few highly proficient, but itinerant, jade workers, who would set up camp and carve it into the lingling-o shapes preferred by the locals.

Finished ornaments were more commonly dated from 500 BC to 500 AD, when there was a flurry in trading activity in the region, and so more chance for a skilled jade worker to travel.

It was already known that obsidian was traded widely across Southeast Asia.

Hung suggests that this trading carried language with it. Today, Austronesian languages are spoken by about 350 million people in Southeast Asia and Oceania. The languages are thought to have started spreading as a people migrated from Taiwan to the Philippines 4,000 years ago. And the distribution of these languages closely mirrors the distribution of Fengtian jade, says Hung.

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Fengtian jade and the Austronesian Cham language are both found in southern Vietnam, for example, but not in northern Vietnam — even though northern Vietnam is closer to the Fengtian source.

Nicole Boivin, from the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK, says that although trade was already widespread in this region at the time in question, using systematic scientific techniques, such as the electron probe microscope, has allowed Hung and her team to get a more detailed picture of what is happening.

“It’s great using scientific methodology to look at this methodically,” says Boivin, “They have really shown in great detail that something is going on.”

*
References
1. Hung, H.-C. et al. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA doi 10.1073/pnas.0707304104 (2007).