It tends to be darker, more subtle colors.

The Freer possesses one of the largest collections of ancient jades from the Neolithic culture that we now call Liangzhu.

The culture is named after its first discovery site near Hangzhou, China, which is essentially southwest of Shanghai.

Bidisks are essentially round, flat donuts.

They're created from, in general, nephrite, which is a specific kind of jade material.

They were clearly important to the society that created them.

They're found in Chinese tombs, elite burials, often in large number.

The ongoing mystery is exactly why they were made and why they were put in tombs.

I think that the shape of the bee was chosen because they learned how to work that shape using rotating tools, a turntable or some type of mechanical device to rotate the jade.

We have a lot of ideas about how jades were worked, and we are quite sure they were largely worked with mineral abrasives, so through the abrasive process of rubbing the surface of the jade one way or another, whether it's sawing or creating a drill hole, mineral abrasives would have been used because no tools would have been available during the Neolithic period.

Clearly it was not made by average people.

These were highly trained artisans who were responsible for making these objects.

The material itself is rare, notoriously difficult to work, so that creation of these objects in nephrite represent a great expenditure of social wealth at the time.

Normally when jade objects come into our laboratory for examination, the first thing we do is we study it visually under a microscope.

The curator usually would like to know the mineral composition of the object.

We use techniques such as x-ray diffraction and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to analyze the jade material.

We look for evidence of manufacturing to learn how the object was made.

That includes looking at the overall shape and form of the object and a more detailed look at the tool marks left on the surface of the jade.

Because of the development of archeology in China and the great interest in Liangzhu culture, it's encouraged us here at the museum to use our collection of some 125 objects as a kind of sample to improve our understanding of the manufacturing techniques of this ancient culture.