Clusters of Beads: Testing for Time in an Eighteenth Century Well

Summary

This paper presents a continuation of the bead study presented at the 2015 SHA conference in which beads from a South Carolina frontier site dating from c.1680-1734 on the Drayton Hall property were tested against Jon Marcoux’s 2012 correspondence analysis of 35,000 glass trade beads from Native American mortuary contexts dated c.1607-1783. The 2012 study discerned four distinct clusters of time from the beads within mortuary contexts. The current paper examines an additional dataset of beads from the Drayton Hall property recovered from a sealed well feature dating from the mid-18th to first quarter 19th century and relating to John Drayton’s period of ownership (c.1750-1779). This paper continues to test the comparative usefulness of Marcoux’s analysis in determining distinct occupation periods on historic period sites and further examines the unique bead types recovered at this historical period site compared to those found in the Native American mortuary contexts. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond and Between the Plantation; The Archaeology of "Everything But" in the American Southeast   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 463