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Updated: May 10, 2025
The Museum of Vannes, where most of the valuable objects found in the excavations are preserved, possesses quartzite, fibrolite, diorite, and even nephrite and jadeite hatchets, some of which materials are not native to Europe; as well as amber beads and a necklace of calaite, that precious stone described by Pliny, and which long remained unknown after his time.
In the Mediterranean obsidian, a volcanic rock, occasionally took the place of flint, especially in Sardinia and Pantelleria. Axes or celts were often made of flint in Scandinavia and North Germany, but elsewhere other stones, such as jade, jadeite, and diorite were commonly used. We can only guess at the way in which the megalithic people were clothed.
One particularly fine bowl shows a series of animals which have been identified by Professor Tagliaferro as the long-horned buffalo, an animal which once existed on the northern coasts of Africa. Ornaments of all kinds were common, and include beads, pendants, and conical buttons of stone and shell. The most remarkable of all are a large number of model celts made of jadeite and other hard stones.
This is by no means an isolated fact; numerous shells from the department of Champagne had been taken to tire shores of the Lesse and the Meuse. At Solutre have been found belemnites, ammonites, and Miocene shells, which were certainly never native to that district, with pieces of rock-crystal from the Alps, and beads made of a jadeite of unknown origin.
Excavations have brought to light more than six hundred celts or knives, generally of smaller size than those found in Denmark or France. Rock of many kinds, including serpentine, schist, felsite, jadeite, diorite, and nephrite, were used; and saws of flint or chalcedony, some toothed on one side only, others on both, are of frequent occurrence.
Another tomb in the same district, that of Mané-er-Hroeck, was intact when discovered in 1863. It contained within its chamber a hoard of 101 axes of fibrolite and jadeite, 50 pebbles of a kind of turquoise known as callaïs, pieces of pottery, flints, and a peculiarly fine celt of jadeite together with a flat ring-shaped club-head of the same stone.
Jadeite and nephrite are met with in the Lake Dwellings of Switzerland and Bavaria, as in the caves of Liguria and Sardinia; chloromelanite in France, and obsidian in Lorraine, in the island of Pianosa and in the Cyclades.
Beneath the Vaureal dolmen were found five skulls in a row, and near one of them, that of a woman, lay a necklace made of round bits of bone and slate, on which hung a little jadeite hatchet as an amulet. These human relics were also accompanied by a fibrolite celt, numerous little worked flints, and some fragments of pottery.
"See this bit of jade?" he continued, getting up from his chair. "Real jade that is. Cosway, of the Gallery, brought it to me when he came home from Peking. That's not real jade you've got at Tory Hill. It's jadeite." "Is it?" She took the little mandarin in her hand, but without examining him. "I've no doubt you've been dreadfully worried about them papa's clients, I mean."
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