The Leedstown (Virginia) Bead Cache: A Contextual Approach

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.

In 1937, while surveying Native American archaeological sites below the falls of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, archaeologist David Bushnell described an unusual cache (reportedly a buried box) of glass beads discovered at Leedstown. Since Bushnell’s discovery, beads from Leedstown have appeared in a multitude of “modern” places: in the collections of Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Chicago Natural History Museum as well as in the possession of local landowners. Some authors have concluded the beads arrived with Spanish explorers, others that the beads were made by glassmakers at Jamestown, still others that the beads date as late as the early eighteenth century. Surprisingly, the Leedstown bead types have not been recovered from a single archaeological site in the Rappahannock valley. This paper places the Leedstown cache into its multiple contexts, local, regional, and curatorial, in an effort to explore their social and cultural significance for Virginia Indians.

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): 659