Why These Beads? Color Symbolism and Colonialism in the Mohawk Valley

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.

Scholarship has long recognized the significance of glass beads in postcolumbian North America. For northeastern Native Americans, beads were relationally entangled within sociopolitical relationships and the spiritual world. In the Mohawk Valley, bead types and colors have been useful temporal markers, but their social and spiritual significance has received less attention. This paper seeks to address the metaphysical significance of glass beads from the Veeder (Fda-2) site, a late seventeenth-century Mohawk village. Through the interpretation of color symbolism, the Veeder bead assemblage can be contextualized alongside multiscalar phenomena such as colonialism, disease, warfare, and the large-scale emigration of Catholic Mohawks. Indeed, the selection of specific bead colors can shed light on the villages’ inhabitants state of being and provide a way to further understand the intersection of colonialism and Native American interactions.

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): 36002.0