A Bead Too Far: Rethinking Global Connections Before Columbus

As a historian of exchange, I am conscious that goods that travel long-distances, are shiny or unusual get all the glory: a lot of history is mundane, low-key and local. Every now and again, though, the glittery, exciting things are important for a reason. A case in point comes from what I think are perhaps the most exciting findings in recent North American archaeology: glass beads, indisputably European, and manufactured in Venice, have been uncovered in pre-Columbian archaeological contexts in Arctic Alaska - thousands of kilometres from their point of origin, and crucially, before Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. This is not merely a story about beads. The findings, reported in American Antiquity by Michael Kunz and Robin Mills reveal the presence of so-called ‘IIa40’ glass trade beads - uniformly turquoise blue, slightly translucent, and finished by the a speo technique, a Venetian process that didn’t exist elsewhere in Europe in the Middle Ages. I’ve been interested in gla ... Read full article.