Bury Me with Beads

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ground stone disk beads represented a tangible signal of wealth within the Salish Sea archaeological record; they appeared continuously from 7,000 – 500 BP across the region in scattered frequencies to massive caches. The massive caches were often observed in a burial context, despite non-burial contexts being more frequent and wide-spread. The differences in both their deposition (burial vs. non-burial) and frequency (scattered vs. caches) demonstrated that beads had a specific conceptual niche within Coast Salish society, communicating wealth in a particular way. This paper intends to look at beads recovered from burial contexts. Examining beads from a burial context acknowledges a relationship between the living and the dead with a focus on how the living represented the dead. Investigating beads recovered from a burial context, with an emphasis on biological sex and age of the individual, contextualizes how an individual was perceived at the time of their death.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25283