Tracing Sixteenth-Century Beads in South America to Understand Their Impact on Indigenous Ritual Practices and Material Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest

Summary

Studying beads and changes in use of beads in a given population provide insight into the impact of outside influences on people in a given population. This research identifies bead types that were valued by indigenous cultures in South America prior to the Spanish Conquest in the Sixteenth-Century, and compares their frequency in six geographic regions within Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia with the frequency of glass beads brought by the Spanish to the same regions. This study examines close to 4000 beads across 50 bead attributes from several museum collections, primarily from The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University and The Field Museum in Chicago. The frequency of bead colors and materials is analyzed to help determine the value of glass beads in these regions. If there were no cultural preferences or significance by color or material, the analysis should provide a random distribution of Spanish introduced glass beads throughout each region. However, statistical analysis of bead distribution shows that indigenous people did not replace pre-existing shell and stone beads with glass beads. This reveals that people in different regions rejected European glass beads presumably because of existing value systems and preferences.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20314