The oldest bead made by American Indians is of bone. It was recovered from a Folsom site near Midland, Texas, and is 10,900 years old. The second-oldest bead is made of oil shale, is 10,100 years old, and was found at a site in Colorado. Both are very small. The bone bead measures 1.6 mm; the shale bead is even smaller. The bone bead is as finely made as the best hishe beads (disk-shaped shell beads with a single hole in the middle) created by contemporary Indian bead makers using modern equipment. Because both of these examples are so small and well made, it is reasonable to assume that bead manufacture was already an ancient art one hundred centuries ago.
Beads have been recovered archaeologically from every area of North America, and they were made from a wide variety of natural materials. By the fifteenth century these included shells, stones, precious and semiprecious gemstones, horn, teeth, ivory, fired clay, gold, silver, copper, pearls, seeds, wood, fruit pits, tree sap, vegetal fibers, and porcupine quills.
That beads were significant in American Indian social life is indicated by their mention in some tribal oral traditions as a supernatural being or part of a deity's name. In the historic period in the American Northeast, Iroquoian and Algonquian tribes made belts from shell beads (wampum) to record important political and diplomatic events. Another gauge of the importance of beads is their placement in large quantities in the graves of high-status individuals such as can be found at Cahokia, a twelfth-century Mississippian site near present-day St. Louis. Recently in the Lambayeque Valley of coastal Peru the excavation of three royal Moche-period (a.d. 100-800) tombs has revealed some of the most beautiful and technically sophisticated beads in the Americas, and perhaps in the world. Made from gold and silver and fashioned in the shapes of spiders, human heads, peanuts, felines, and owls, these beads are by their very nature proof of the prominent role they played in the social and ritual life of the Moche kingdoms.
Because Europeans had traded manufactured glass beads with great success in Africa and the Far East, it is not surprising that beads were among the items Columbus carried to the Americas on his first voyages. Caribbean native peoples traded locally made items for the glass beads, representative samples of which have subsequently been found in archaeological sites. Glass beads became staple items in the stock of trade materials carried everywhere in the Americas, in part because of their light weight, but also because they were popular and profitable.
American Indians incorporated glass beads into their aesthetic and technical systems, and in some places replaced native-made beads with the new trade versions. Beads were strung, sewn, netted, woven, and used as inlay, and these techniques continue to be of primary importance today. The fibers used to attach beads to objects were initially made by natives from vegetal fiber or mammal sinew, but once it appeared, manufactured thread tended to replace these materials. When European traders introduced a variety of colors in their bead stock, tribes developed preferences for particular colors, and the wise trader provided his customers with the hues of their choice. It is evident that in some places, such as the American plains and woodlands, indigenous aesthetic and technical systems influenced the development of beadwork as a new art form. In these areas it is relatively easy to identify some beaded designs as having originally been executed in porcupine quillwork. Similarly, some bead techniques are visual replacements for earlier quillwork techniques.
Networks of trade and exchange are ancient in the Americas, and the adoption of glass beads and other exotic trade materials by American Indians created conditions for a realignment of traditional exchange relationships. Once beads (and other items such as guns, metal tools, etc.) became necessities rather than luxuries, Indians were tied irretrievably to a network of reciprocal exchanges with Europeans.
By 1850 almost all Indian communities were eager to acquire glass beads and were experimenting with new techniques and artistic approaches made possible by the new medium. In some areas native artists preferred working with the new materials to engaging in more labor-intensive, indigenous crafts (e.g., porcupine quillwork) and stopped using the older decorative techniques, while in other areas artists continued to use both.
By the twentieth century beadwork using glass beads had become one of the hallmarks of American Indian arts and, in the minds of many non-Indians, the emblem of Indian ethnicity. Most bead artists have been and continue to be women, and they have been very creative in the development of new techniques, styles, and aesthetics, as well as extremely productive. With the exception of ritual material, beadwork that has found its way into museum collections was generally made by women—a fact not often recognized. In many areas the money earned by women through the sale of their beadwork made a major contribution to the family economy, and this is still true today. Income realized through the sale of beaded items continues to be an important element in the lives of many Indian families, whose members often collaborate in the manufacture of beadwork for sale. Some families travel the powwow circuit, selling directly to the public, while others sell their work to middlemen. Some types of modern beadwork are more valuable than others, and artists can thus realize a greater return for their labor. Very fine hishe-bead necklaces handmade from shell and turquoise by Pueblo artists can sell for thousands of dollars in fine jewelry stores. In contrast, most glass beadwork made in the plains, although its manufacture is as labor-intensive as is the making of hishe-bead necklaces, yields only the basic minimum wage for its creators.
Notwithstanding the economic importance of beadmaking, a significant portion of all glass beadwork is made for personal or family use, to be worn within the context of modern Indian social life.
There is still some production of beads from natural materials, particularly in the American Southwest, where beadmakers use shell, coral, and turquoise for hishe necklaces that are principally sold to a non-Indian market. On the other hand wampum, made in the Northeast, and shell and soapstone beads, made in California, are intended for Indian consumption.
Traditionally, beadworking was learned within a family setting, and that is still the case for the majority of modern bead artists. However, the establishment of arts-and-crafts programs in both urban and reservation settings created new opportunities for instruction beginning in the 1960s.
There are tens of thousands of contemporary bead artists who create original items and infuse this ancient art form with renewed energy. One of the best known is Vanessa Paukeigope Jennings of Anadarko, Oklahoma, who received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989 in recognition of her mastery of all of the traditional Kiowa art forms. She is representative of a generation of beadworkers who, having learned their art from their grandmothers, remain committed to the traditional forms but reinterpret them with new vision.
Today, modern communication, transportation, and Native American competitive art shows contribute to increased levels of intertribal artistic exchange. Tribally distinct styles have largely given way to regional styles, with a few exceptions. Bead artists are embracing visual influences from many sources including popular culture, advertising logos, movies, comic books, and, more recently, computer-generated designs. The marketing of beadwork is fully subsumed in the national economy: one-of-a-kind high-fashion items are available for a select clientele; less distinctive items appear in mail-order catalogs and in thousands of retail stores throughout the United States.
Like artists everywhere, beadworkers have continually invented and reinterpreted their own visual culture and incorporated their new ideas into local traditions. The thousands of contemporary beadworkers working today are making their own contributions to an art form and a heritage that is more than ten thousand years old.
William C. Orchard, Beads and Beadwork of the American Indians (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1975); Monte Smith, The Technique of North American Indian Beadwork (Ogden, Utah: Eagle's View Publishing Company, 1983).
JoAllyn Archambault
Standing Rock Sioux
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
