After ten years of exploration in the Italian Alps, researchers from the CNRS discovered jade deposits (jadeite, omphacite, eclogite) that had been mined since the end of the 6th millennium BC. This discovery led to the JADE Project (National Research Agency), developed between 2006 and 2010.The quarries on Mont Viso, located between 1,500 and 2,400 m above sea level, were the source of large axes made from precious stone that circulated throughout Western Europe during the 5th and 4th millennia over considerable distances, covering 3,300 km from west to east, from Ireland to Bulgaria, and over 2,000 km from north to south, from Denmark to Sicily.This book traces the discovery of the Alpine quarries, the production standards of socially valued axes, and the conditions of their long-distance transfer, where these polished blades were used in social competitions and by elites in religious rituals.On a European scale, the study of some 1,700 long axes made of Alpine jade now provides a very different picture of the Neolithic period from what we thought we knew. The manipulation of myths and symbolic objects made of jade helped establish a form of theocratic power that found its most beautiful illustration in Brittany, around the Gulf of Morbihan, where monumental steles and giant tumuli began to appear in the mid-5th millennium.The circulation of Alpine jade thus appears to be an extraordinary phenomenon of unsuspected magnitude in unequal societies, with Varna in the east and the Gulf of Morbihan in the west appearing as two poles of the social dynamics that animated Europe during the fifth and fourth millennia.