Bead Trade Worldwide. The Spread of Material Goods and Ideas Through Time and Space  

Bead Trade Worldwide. The Spread of Material Goods and Ideas Through Time and Space      by Dr. Robert Liu

“We study ancient ornaments to understand our past and ourselves”

“We study ethnographic ornaments to understand other cultures”

“We study contemporary beads and ornaments to understand crafting techniques and what will soon be our history”

 

On July 17, 2018, we listened to a presentation from Dr. Robert Liu.

We are currently in a golden age of discovery for beads. Scientists like archeologists now have sophisticated machines that can analyze the composition of stone and glass beads, leading to information on where the material for such beads were made, their age, etc., much like how DNA and RNA studies changed the field of biology. Yet at the same time, the number of people who collect beads are declining, so it is a paradoxical time for the bead community.

Today’s lecture will cover the oldest beads, perforated teeth and shells that I have studied from the Paleolithic of France, from 19,000 BCE to the present day. The first slide shows Jatim beads from the 5th-6th CE, as well as a replica from 1990, then one from 1995. In a period of just 5 years, the Javanese beadmakers were able to improve their skills so that it is now very hard to tell an original from a replica. This demonstrates how human skills can vastly improve quickly and may tell us about similar skills in antiquity.

The third slide shows the perforated ornaments from 19,000BCE and grooved elk teeth from the Russian Mesolithic, about 8000 to 6000 BCE; most likely grooving an object is a technique learned from the Neanderthals, with whom we have interbred. They made the earliest cave art 64,000 years ago.

What was precious in the ancient world? Rare, scarce materials from far away, like lapis, turquoise, quartz, carnelian + patterned agates and/or those materials that took much skill /labor to work into finished products. Preciousness was closely related to status, control by elites; much working of prestige goods was in palaces or temples, under tight elite supervision in ancient societies.

Trade in the ancient world began possibly 300,000 yrs ago, in Kenya of stone tools and ochre. Ancient trade was either long-, medium distance or trickle down. The red, arrowed lines on the map indicate possible trade routes; recently, more emphasis on the maritime route from Indus to Persian Gulf via the Arabian Sea. Centers like Teppe Hissar and Shahr-i-Sokhta on the Iranian Plateu reduced the waste content of raw lapis ore from Badakhshan Province in Afghanistan, in order to lower transportation costs and increase the value of the lapis products, including finished beads. From raw ore to finished bead, there is an 80% material loss. End customers like Sumer were some 1200 miles from Afghan lapis mines. Lapis was sourced from Afghanistan or Baluchistan; copper from Baluchistan or Rajasthan; carnelian from Gujarat or Rajasthan.

Trade from Anatolia to the Indus Valley, 2nd-3rd millenium BCE. Examples: carnelian lone bicone beads exported from Indus to Mesopotamia; oxhide copper ingots (oxhide symbol for Baal) and cobalt blue glass ingots from Uluburun shipwreck off Turkey, 1400 BCE; probably Egyptian glass being traded to Aegean.

Beautiful necklace of banded agates, other stone and gold beads, with a long carnelian bicone, from a Warrior’s Grave, Akkadian Period, c. 2250 BCE, in Mesopotamia. The carnelian bicone bead was an import from the Indus Valley. In this slide, I show how such long bicone carnelian beads were used in necklaces, as well as the famed bead cloak of Queen Puabi, now at the Penn Museum.

Harappan jewelry shows both trade and technology transfer. This belt from the Indus Valley, of 42 long bicone carnelian beads (1 of 2 known) with copper alloy spacers and terminals, probably took 2-3 years to make (Kenoyer 2003). Just the drilling of these valued carnelian beads took 3-8 days each, besides the other manufacturing processes and difficulty of gathering large enough carnelian nodules for the long bicone beads.

The next slide shows the making and drilling of stone beads, in Cambay and the Indus Valley, a long process of mining the raw carnelian nodules, testing their quality by chipping a window in the nodule, discarding or accepting it; if so, it went to the stone merchant, who then dried the nodule, heated it in a covered pot, chipped and split the nodule, made a bead roughout, did a second heating, then a second chipping, grinding on grooved sandstone, then polishing/drilling it, followed by a final heating, which results in the finished bead. Repeated heating deepens the color to a deep red. The beads were drilled with fired ernestite drills; this technique first occurred about 2450 BCE. Essentially same process continued until very recently, but instead of ernestite drills, current beadmakers in the Indian subcontinent use diamond drills. It is very difficult to tell current bead roughouts from those of 2000 BCE, showing the conservative nature of stone beadmaking. Currrent analytical technology like laser ablation inductively couple plasma mass spectrometry enables scientests to tell the source of stones like carnelian, whether from India, Iran or Egypt.

The next map shows trade of Khambhat/Cambay agate beads in the 10th-14th century, primarily via maritime trade to the Persian Gulf, Red Sea or east Africa or to South, Southeast and East Asia.
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Other stones, like jade, were also traded in antiquity, like the jade and glass version of these lingling-o  earrings from the Sa Huynh Culture, Vietnam (C. 1000 BCE – 2nd century CE) : This slide shows evidence of early trade (Jade from Taiwan), use of glass by craftspeople working in other media, and glass substituting for other materials, often precious. Nephrite earrings, processed jade/blanks and the distribution map of such ornaments, from Taiwan to Indonesia, spans 3000 years of trade and technology transfer (Hung et al., 2007).

The next slide shows the chronological relationship of glass to other silicates: Faience, another silicate like glass, is about 6500 years old, while glass is about 4500 years old. faience was the first human-made material amenable to molding and less labor-intensive  techniques for colored ornaments. Even though faience is self-glazing, it still takes a complex operation of grinding all the ingredients, mixing them together with water, then either handforming or placing into a mold, then firing in a container. Egyptians used fired terracotta molds to make hundreds of different types of amulets, inlays and other small ornaments for jewelry, usually very precisely, since molds were used.

In antiquity, raw glass was a valuable trade item; blue round glass ingots were found on c.1400 bce wreck off Turkey. In 1996, Dudley Giberson demonstrated how frit from crushed ingots could be used with little waste, to make the base layer of core-formed beads, which was a fine intersection of art and science, as no one knew before then how you could utilize small ingots of glass without wasting much of it.

Trade in glass and probably the ingredients used to color glass were important throughout antiquity. An example is the worldwide trade in Islamic glass, especially beads,  from 700-1400 CE. In 2006, Sage and Tom Holland described how Islamic folded beads were made, which greatly aided identification. Islamic glass beads were traded widely, throughout Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa and Island Southeast Asia, and even to Iceland.

Another mystery Dr. Liu discussed was the early Roman tabular mosaic face beads found throughout many parts of the world. Especially puzzling are such beads from Nubia, which raise the question whether only one type of face cane, that of Gorgon, was made and distributed to beadmakers, the end users. The supposition is that beadmakers placed slices of such canes onto beads, or pierced them to make tabular beads. They either left them as Gorgon, or hotworked them into Medusa, who has long black hair, a neck, necklace and bust. Archeologists have yet to find a workshop where these types of beads could have been created. Perhaps compositional testing of the glass will provide answers. Distribution maps of both early and late Roman mosaic face beads were shown.

Other examples of historic trade in beads were presented, such as the trade in Chinese glass beads of Yuan to Qing period, 1271-1911 CE.

It was noted that the making of powder glass pendants by both Plains Indians in the 18th – 19th century in America and Mauritania during 1820-1830s were coincidental similarities, not due to long-distance exchange of ideas.

Precolumbian jewelry of the Americas, ranging from the Prehistoric Southwest cultures, to Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations were described, as they used similar materials and techniques in their jewelry, or sometimes similar ideology, such as the use of bat imagery in jewelry of Meso-, northern South America and in the Caribbean.

Both Europe and the Americas used two genera of shells, Spondylus and Glycymeris, respectively starting about 8,000 and 5,000 years ago. Such shells were used for jewelry, often intricate mosaic overlay or inlay, for garments and also as ritual objects. Liu showed examples of simple as well as elaborate intact jewelry using spondylus shells or components. In the Prehistoric Southwest, there are rare examples of mosaic overlay pendants, in the form of birds or frogs. The concept of using this technique may have been influenced by Mesoamerica. Since turquoise was an important part of such shell jewelry, Liu discussed trade of this stone between mines in the Southwest and Mesoamerica, although some new research indicated that Mesoamerica had its own turquoise sources, although no mines have yet been found. Other trade items were also discussed, such as argilite, a red stone from the vicinity of Prescott, AZ.

Many people, looking at a bead or ornament today, have no idea of the history that lies behind such objects. Dr. Liu has spent most of his life trying to discover the mystery of their development. He is an ethologist, gerontologist, photographer, writer, jeweler, ship model maker, and has been the co-owner and co-editor of Ornament Magazine from 1974 to 2018.

To learn more about Dr. Robert Liu: Ornament Magazine

 

By marilyn peters