Bead Biographies: Exploring the Movement of Glass Beads in Colonial California
Author(s): Lee Panich; Rebecca Allen
Year: 2018
Summary
Recent excavations at Mission San José (ca. 1797-1840s) in central California unearthed over 3,000 glass beads. Such items are commonly recovered from Spanish colonial missions and contemporaneous sites on the Pacific Coast of North America, yet they have proven difficult to interpret beyond their assumed role as trade beads. We believe there is great potential for the humble glass bead to serve as the reference point against which to understand the complex social relationships that constituted Spanish missionization in the region. The bead assemblage from Mission San José will be compared to similar collections from other nearby missions, colonial outposts, and autonomous native villages. This paper will also explore how the concepts of object biography and object itinerary might illuminate the different meanings that glass beads had for Native people, for Euro-American colonizers, and for archaeologists today.
Cite this Record
Bead Biographies: Exploring the Movement of Glass Beads in Colonial California. Lee Panich, Rebecca Allen. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, New Orleans, Louisiana. 2018 ( tDAR id: 441194)
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Keywords
General
Glass Beads
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Native Americans
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Spanish Missions
Geographic Keywords
North America
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United States of America
Temporal Keywords
1769-1850
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 341