The concepts of exchange, of circulation and of networks of interaction play a key role in our understanding of the Neolithic in Europe. A previous ANR-funded project, ‘JADE’ (2006–2009) focused on the axeheads of Alpine jades that circulated around western Europe during the 5th and 4th millennia BC. Movements of Alpine axeheads over distances of up to 1700 kilometres as the crow flies were identified, reaching to the Atlantic coast to the west, and the shore of the Black Sea to the east. The impression that is produced by the distribution maps and the contexts of deposition is one of strongly inegalitarian societies, where exchanges were controlled by an elite, who manipulated these objects by consecrating and/or sacrificing them. Such activities certainly were concerned with competitive displays of power, but they were also bound up with religious rituals, with mythology, and with the conceptual reproduction of society. We can oppose this western Europe of jade with an eastern Europe of copper. This division of Neolithic Europe into two, with its two systems of social value, profoundly changes our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of the Neolithic. The new project, JADE 2, involves a social approach to the contexts of discovery of Neolithic jade objects in Europe. Using this approach, and by comparing the centres of production in the western Alps and Piedmont with the peripheries of ‘jade Europe’, it seeks to explore the varying conceptual significance of these remarkable object-signs – the variability being linked with their social function, which differed from region to region. It appears that the social function of jade objects became reconfigured as they passed through different cultural groups between the Atlantic and the Black Sea. In seeking to complete the inventory of jade objects and their contexts of deposition, especially in central Europe and the Balkans, the objective of JADE 2 is to reconstruct one part of the social and historical dynamic of Neolithic Europe between the end of the 6th millennium and the beginning of the 4th millennium, by exploring the concepts which underpinned the long-distance movement of large axeheads and ring-discs of Alpine rock over a network that extended some 3000 kilometres from east to west.