Stone beads

It’s Canada Day!  Canada is 148 years old.  This blip is about something from long before this made by some of the first people here before there were “Canadians.”

A few days ago, Niklas found a bead on the beach.  I think I’ve never blipped them.  My neighbor across the bay spent a lot of time on the beach at the end of the bay when her kids were small and found many artifacts from First Nations….   Including lots of these small round stones with a hole drilled in the center. (some are broken)  So we tried to find out more about them… it wasn’t easy.  I asked 2 different NW Coast Art professors at the UW and they didn’t know,  I looked in lots of pull out drawers at the BC’s Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver but didn't find any quite like these.  A 1973 book by Hilary Stewart (Stone, Bone, Antler & Shell, Artifacts of the Northwest Coast) does have some of her excellent drawings from a dig near Vancouver.   She says “ Stone beads are generally uncommon in archeological sites, altho thousands were found in a site near Vancouver.  Such a quantity suggests great wealth, considering the amount of work involved in making each bead… It’s not clear how the perforations are made , or with what kind of drilling tool.”   I haven’t found any for a while so when Nik found this one  (on the bottom of the photo) I googled them and found a very interesting article from 2012 having found 350,000 in a burial site farther up the coast in BC possibly from 4000 years ago.  HERE
For scale, the clam shell in this picture is 1 5/8 inches (44 mm)


The extra photo is the beach where these are found, a perfect shell beach, here at a very low tide this morning, a site where long ago there would be canoes pulled up on the summer camp for a Salish First Nations community.  I can almost see them.   And, there’s my neighbor and her dog walking across, looking for what she might find today.   We also have a midden (First Nations garbage dump) identified nearer to us by another small shell beach which I’ll blip another time…I’ve never found a bead there however.