Adorning Localities: An Investigation of Shell Beads in Holocene Southwestern Madagascar

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In African and Indo-Pacific contexts, beads play a significant role in the maintenance of social and economic networks across long distances. In modern continental African contexts, these networks are argued to represent delayed reciprocity, with beads acting as a currency to secure the relationship between distant gifting partners. However, archaeological studies have tended to focus on the oldest contexts, colonization era glass beads, and imports. As such, the function and typology of mid-late Holocene African shell beads have received less attention. Here we present an assemblage of whole shell and disc beads from 18 archaeological sites within Velondriake Marine Protected Area of southwest Madagascar, an island whose Indigenous bead traditions remain critically understudied. This project seeks to understand: 1) the range of taxa used to make shell beads, 2) the ecologies of exploited taxa, and 3) how beads were created, used, and traded. We approach these topics using a chaine opératoire framework.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37460.0