Investigating Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Wendat Local Interactions Using Glass Bead Chemistry

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Glass Beads and Ornaments in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Glass trade beads are one of the earliest forms of European material culture to be integrated into Wendat daily lives in the early colonization period in the eastern Great Lakes region. From the late sixteenth century, Wendat and other Indigenous people traded, modified, and circulated these small durable possessions among their communities, likely both as individual objects and as part of strings and garments. Ontario archaeologists have long used the variation in glass bead types as a tool in chronological organization, but have focused less research on reasons for differences in glass bead assemblages within Wendat territory. To focus on the journey of beads within Wendake, we employ minimally destructive LA-ICP-MS analysis of 350 polychrome and monochrome beads from 13 Wendat sites attributed to four different Nations of the Wendat confederacy. Combined with legacy data obtained with INAA, we examine the dataset for differences in the base glass composition and trace elements of beads from sites of different Nations, ages, and settlement sizes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Recent Research on Glass Beads and Ornaments in North America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35791.0