I’m not so sure why MacGregor included this Jade Axe in the program, apart from it’s being pretty beautiful. (Probably he wants to bring it home to England, every now and then...there's more of this to come.) This object is a ceremonial, high-status version of the kind of handaxe he studied in Podcast #3, the sort that enables travel. In this case, it was travel to the farthest reaches of the world--England, which had no great river valley civilization, indeed which until very recently was just a bunch of little villages, each with their own pub. They found this jade axe in Canterbury; what’s odd about that is that there’s no jade in England, and a French geologist identified the source rock way up high in the Italian Alps. So there’s trade and people who can afford unnecessarily high-status items for you!
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