Glass Beads: Global Artefacts, Local Perspectives

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Glass Beads: Global Artefacts, Local Perspectives," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The archaeological study of glass beads first developed around Lake Ontario, where researchers used these artefacts to explore the impact of early European trade on Indigenous societies living far inland in North America. The construction of chrono-typologies made glass trade beads a go-to artefact for dating contexts of the 16th-19th centuries. However, as more archaeologists around the world began to study this period, they brought new data and new approaches to the study of glass beads. This symposium will explore global trade circuits, geochemical provenancing, glass beads in contexts other than the colonial trade, non-European manufacturing centres, Indigenous agency, beads and gender, and other themes that reflect the conceptual tension of globalisation and decolonisation in glass bead studies. Our goal is to foster dialogue among archaeologists who think about glass beads in different ways, depending on where they are on the planet and how they approach the early modern period.