#métis

rhysintherain:

rhysintherain:

rederiswrites:

Actually, ancient glass, having been rather neglected by archaeology for decades, is a pretty exciting topic in scholarship right now. The main thing is that glass persists–it’s very stable. After fabric rots and metal turns to a scrap of rust, there will lie a necklace, still scattered across a chest that itself has turned mostly to earth. 

Bead typologies, for example (that is, the classification of different styles/shapes/decorative motifs/colors) can allow scholars to trace trade routes, as they study the distributions of different bead types over time and geography. Glass production is kinda industrial in nature, not like spinning or beer that make good cottage industries. It was often produced in one place, and then sold on to artisans elsewhere, and then the beads themselves were traded across entire continents. 

Chemical analysis of the glass can do even more to trace routes, since different compositions and incidence of different mineral contaminants can allow archaeologists to trace glass production to individual sites, thousands of years after the fact. It’s dizzying, really.

The downside is that for a long time, archaeologists regarded beads as unimportant trinkets, and antiquities dealers understood that they were easy to take and easy to move. So an awful lot of the most exceptional beads we have from the distant past spent time in private collections or uncategorized drawers somewhere in a museum back room, so they’ve lost much of what we could have learned from their original provenance. Maybe we’ll be able to turn new analytical tools on some of these to reconstruct more of their past.

One of the coolest things I’ve seen was a conference presentation about the excavation and preservation of an intact piece of 1800s Metis beadwork.

It was found at a homestead site on the prairies. All the fabric it had been stitched to (probably a dress or a skirt) was gone, and all the thread that held it together had rotted away, but as they’d excavated it, clearing soil bead by bead, most of the floral pattern was still intact, laid out just as it had fallen.

It was an incredible sight, to see pictures of brightly colored floral beadwork lying in the dirt, as bright and beautiful as when it was made.

Beads are really cool.

Since some people have asked about preservation:

I don’t remember off the top of my head, but I think it probably involved using some kind of flexible adhesive to hold the beads in place while the piece was removed.

I couldn’t find the actual publication by googling on my phone, but it’s Eric Tebby’s (university of Alberta) work at the Chimney Coulee site, if you want to see what you can find.