Glass Trade Beads of Southeast America
The prehistoric natives, in both continents that would come to be known as the Americas, made and wore many bead type ornaments. They used various minerals, ceramics, shell, bone and probably wood to fashion these decorative embellishments but the manufacture and usage of Indian made ornamentations began to come to an end in the late fifteenth century. Christopher Columbus recorded in his log on October 12, 1492 that he gave strings of glass trade beads to the natives in the island that would become San Salvador. That began almost four hundred years of giving American Indians trade beads as simple gifts and/or in exchange for furs, deer skins and land
The word bead comes from the Middle English language words bede or bedu which means prayer – as in prayer beads. Beads have been used by various cultures around the world for tens of thousands of years with glass beads being made in Egypt as early as 2181 BC. The artisans in Venice Italy began making glass beads around AD 1240 but the hazardous manufacture of these ornaments was transferred to the Italian island of Murano in AD 1291 because of the danger of fires in the Venetian city. Between 1500 and 1530, there were twenty-five large glass bead making factories operating in Murano. Later these beads would be made in other Italian cities, in Bohemia and Monrovia (modern Czech Republic), Holland, England, France, Spain and even in China and large quantities of the glass jewelry from all these worldly regions were brought to the Americas and used for bartering purposes.
Today there is much confusion concerning various types of glass trade beads since the factories that made the items kept very few written records on manufacturing methods. The European craft guilds were very secretive and most information regarding the making of the glass beads was passed on verbally and under penalty of death for unauthorized disclosure. Most of the names used today are generic terms such as pony or seed beads and apply to the sizes of the items and have no relationship to the country where made or the regions in America where found. Beginning with the Spaniards in AD 1539, European and later American explorers traded tens of millions of the little glass beads in North America. The Italians recorded that in 1764 over 2.2 million pounds of glass trade beads were made just in the Venice region, much of which probably came to this country. The earliest beads were somewhat large and are considered to be of the necklace variety. The later examples are generally smaller and were used for necklaces as well as being sewn onto clothing and the Indians themselves traded the beads to other native groups who were located further away from the western hemisphere bases of the Europeans. The early Euro/Americans actually tried to make glass trade beads in a factory built in Jamestown Virginia in 1622 but the area aborigines burned it to the ground a year later.
The European bead makers used several techniques to manufacture the ornaments. The first ones were made by a method called winding in which the molten glass was wound around an iron rod and remained there until cool at which time they were then cut into small pieces. Blown glass beads were also made in which the artisan used a hollow cylinder to blow the molten glass into the desired sizes and shapes after which the individual beads were separated. Drawn beads were made by one craftsman holding an end of a length of molten glass while another carried the other end along a very long corridor thus drawing the pliable material after which the drawn length would have been sectioned into bead sizes. The last major technique for making beads was molding or pressing in which the molten glass was poured into two part molds and the halves pressed together until the glass cooled. After being cut to size, all these rough beads were placed in large metal drums with lime, carbonate, sand and water and the drums rotated thus smoothing the objects within. They were then placed in sacks of fermented bran and shaken until the beads were polished. Most of these beads were monochrome or single colored where various minerals were used to impart desired hues to the molten glass. Iron was used to make red beads while cobalt was used for blue. Copper made the beads green; tin colored the beads white and on rare occasions gold was used for amber beads. Glass beads were also made colorless or translucent, in black, in yellow and in multi-colors, though when found on Historic Period village sites, all these colors will generally be faded from being in the ground for hundreds of years. It has been estimated that glass trade beads were made in over one hundred thousand shapes, sizes and designs. The basic shapes mainly included round, tube and oval or barrel. The sizes ranged from seed beads as small as 1/16” in diameter to “robin egg” beads that can be larger than one inch. The designs are almost endless with single color, multicolored, twisted, faceted, onion skin and mosaic styles to name a few.
Most of the trading in this country was done by men of English, Dutch, French, Spanish or Russian heritage. According to history, in 1624 the Dutchman Peter Minuit traded $24 worth of glass beads to the natives in order to buy Manhattan Island. This, though, is a myth that was actually written over 250 years after it supposedly happened. The Hudson Bay Company was begun in 1670 and was responsible for the vast majority of beads being brought to America. In particular they traded beads that are generally called green hearts, white hearts or yellow hearts but whose name is actually Cornaline d’Aleppo. These beads have a red exterior color with green, white or yellow internally and were made and traded from around 1680 to 1830 during what is called the American Fur Trade Period. From the interior regions of the southeast into the upper Midwest and out to the Pacific Ocean, Russian barters exchanged many thousands of short multiple faceted blue beads that are today called Russian blues. These beads were not made in Russia, though, but in Bohemia and China and they were traded in the colors of blue, green, amber and white in spite of all the style being called Russian blues. The rarest and most desirable glass beads of the trading period are called chevrons and were probably made mostly in Holland. Also called star, patermoster or sun beads, these complex ornaments are very colorful and were made in four to seven individual layers of alternating colors of glass. When the ends of the beads were ground and polished all the colors could be seen. In the southeast, glass beads were traded into most of the coastal regions and inland into the mountains and beyond. Heavy concentrations have been found in eastern Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia and many have been found in coastal Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Other areas where large quantities have been discovered are along the Tennessee River valley in Tennessee, near the Dan and Pee Dee Rivers in the Carolinas, the Chattahoochee River in Georgia and the Tallapoosa River in Alabama. Most of the beads found in these areas will date from around AD 1650 to 1825 and will include every variety brought into this country for trading purposes.
Since the natives only had natural materials with which to make their jewelry, it would seem obvious that they would have been desirous of obtaining these shiny and colorful ornaments. As previously mentioned in this article, tens of millions of glass beads were bartered to the Indians after AD 1492 and many collectors and scholars today maintain that the number could be over one hundred million. They are not particularly difficult to find in plowed fields on alluvial plains of the rivers throughout the South but being small it takes time to pick them up and amass enough to actually make a necklace. Care should be taken, though, if you decide to purchase supposedly old beads since many of the early styles are still being made and sold today. Discovering ancient Indian artifacts when and where they can be found is a fascinating hobby. So locate a plowed field bordering a river and, with the owner’s permission, walk and pick up some arrowheads and, hopefully, some glass trade beads of southeast America.
REFERENCES:
Brain, Jeffery P.
TUNICA TREASURE
1979
Brown, Eric E.
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Dubin, Lois S.
THE HISTORY OF BEADS
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Dubin, Lois S.
NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN JEWELRY AND ADORNMENT
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Fenstermaker, Gerald B.
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Gallay, Alan
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THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH EMPIRE IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH, 1670-1717
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Orchard, William C.
BEADS AND BEADWORK OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS
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Setzer, Frank M. and Jesse D. Jenkins
PEACHTREE MOUND AND VILLAGE SITE,
CHEROKEE COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA
1941
Smith, Marvin T.
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THE CONFERENCE ON HISTORIC SITE ARCHAEOLOGICAL PAPERS, 1979
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Waselkov, Gregory A.
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SOUTHEASTERN ARCHAEOLOGY
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