Pieces of Places - First Preliminary Report from the Jade Odyssey Project on the New Discoveries of the Jadeitite Quarries in the Kampos Valley on the Cycladic Island of Syros

Jadeitite is an extremely rare raw material, which has been highly desirable throughout human history because of its rarity, beauty, and resilience to breakage, and is thus ideal for making axes of high prestige and status. Jadeitite-polished stone tools (axes, adzes, chisels, and wedges) are an unexplored group of objects within Aegean prehistory. However, recent discoveries by researchers in our team have documented their existence at Neolithic sites all over the Aegean region. The identification of all these jadeitite axes has raised the important question of where these tools were procured and whether the source could be located. Only two jadeitite sources in the Aegean region have been cited in the geological literature. One is located on the Cycladic island of Syros, while the other is located near Harmancık in Western Anatolia. In 2021 and 2022, a Greek-Danish survey was undertaken in an attempt to locate jadeitite sources and prehistoric quarrying activities on Syros. During the investigations, it quickly became clear that the sources in the Kampos Valley, located in the northern part of Syros, were exploited during prehistoric times. This preliminary article presents the first results from these investigations of the Jade Odyssey Project from Kampos, showing unusual symbolic behaviour, with depositions in the fissures of rock boulders, combined with a highly specialized and large-scale production of preforms made to produce polished stone tools of jadeitite. These new discoveries confirm that jadeitite is a unique raw material, and the quarrying processes were associated with a complex set of symbolic behaviour, involving narratives associated with distant sources, special quarrying places, all of which were embedded in the produced and exchanged polished stone tools of jadeitite.