Power in Numbers: Reconstructing Provenience Through an Investigation of 283,000 Beads

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Schumacher Collection, which was excavated in 1877 from Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles, contains approximately 283,000 shell and glass beads that lack provenience data. While beads are often examined through a framework of personal adornment and identity construction, antiquated collections can present challenges to this type of research due to the utter lack of recorded information. Questions about the collection include information about who the wearer or creator of the beads was, when the beads were worn or used, or even the location of where the beads came from. Consequently, in order to provide some context, this paper takes a step back from an adornment perspective and instead presents a statistical method in which total proportions of bead types can help to reconstruct this important information. Through this method, provenience can be better established and future work can pursue more nuanced analysis into antiquated collections.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 343