Many millennia ago, at the mouth of the Bizmoune cave in North Africa, a few miles inland from what is now the Moroccan coastal city of Essaouira, a person – or, possibly, persons – sat threading beads made from the smoothed and perforated shells of sea snails: the first ornamentation, the first spark of art, more than twice as old as the earliest cave paintings. In deep time, this was a mere blink of an eye after humans discovered fire; textiles only appeared around 90,000 years later, pottery 10,000 years after that.
From adornment to interior decoration, the history of beads is a long one (142,000 years at least) and somewhat understudied for something so prevalent across cultures around the globe. No other design object has so much variation in form, colour, material and size – nor such a wide variety of uses, from the decorative to the devotional.
‘They’re such simple things,’ says archaeologist and Merovingian bead expert Mette Langbroek, who recently worked on 5000 Years of Beads, an exhibition of primarily Dutch pieces currently on at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden. ‘They’re really the first [forms of] self-expression. You find beads in every single culture; you find beads in every single era. And they all have their own story.’
In Medieval monasteries across western Europe, monks counted their prayers on beaded rosaries (the English word ‘bead’ derives from a Germanic word for ‘prayer’, while the word ‘rosary’ was a mistranslation of the Sanskrit word, ‘japamala’ – Buddhist meditative beads first used two millennia earlier). In 17th-century North America, it’s said, Dutch trader Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan from the Lenape for a bag of beads – at that time used as currency. In southern Africa in the early 19th century, Zulu maidens beaded symbolic love letters for their beaux, using colourful glass numbers imported from Europe.
Beads have even become a small source of illumination for scholars of the Dark Ages, casting new light on what was going on in the world of 6th-century craft. In one site unearthed in Holland, women were found buried with ‘tonnes of beads’, says Langbroek. ‘In a single necklace, you find beads that were made locally, but also beads that were made in India and all the areas in between. These women – you know, they’re living on very simple farms; they’re not the elite – but they’re wearing the world around their necks.’
The image of using a simple string of beads to thread right through the history of design is a compelling one – and a still relatively young project, since we’ve only been able to chemically date the glass pieces for around a quarter of a century. This means that the story of beads, which in many ways is the story of the world – of trade and travel, of style and status, of symbolism and art – is only just being brought to light. Previously, ceramics were the main markers of early trade routes and cultural meeting points: now, researchers have a new tool of the trade to add to the academic arsenal.
‘When I started being able to piece together what was going on with the beads, I realised that it tells a completely different story,’ says Marilee Wood, who specialises in the study of glass beads traded into Africa between the 7th and 17th centuries. ‘You only get one side of the picture with the ceramics: you get a totally different story from the glass beads.’
Face beads, for example, are thought to have been used to ward off evil or offer protection; in some instances, they represent the heads of figures from Classical myth, like the serpent-haired pate of Medusa. They first appeared in the early Roman period and have turned up almost everywhere, in places as geographically distant as Sudan, Crimea and Iran. Could these findings signal trade routes as yet undiscovered, or a widespread artistic tendency that transcends stories of influence? These are the kinds of big questions that these objects pack into their little forms, concentrating the histories of art, trade and artisanship.
Perhaps because several crafts are involved in creating these objects, including glassmaking, wood-carving and textile work, they have come to occupy a somewhat liminal space between art and craft. A particularly brilliant expression of the cross-currents between the two was created by the Bulawayo-based cooperative, Marigold: interpreting works by William Kentridge, the beadwork pieces of these artists hammer home the fineness of that dividing line.
Working with beads has had something of a revival in the contemporary art scene over the past few decades, kicking off in the 1990s with Liza Lou’s Kitchen (1991–1996) and Trailer (1998–2000), the latter of which has been recently acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, soon to be re-exhibited anew.
Embellishing interiors and household objects with beads seems to be a particularly popular theme: Kathleen Ryan’s ‘Bad Fruit’ series reconstructs the past-their-sell-by-date contents of a fridge as begemmed behemoths, while self-taught artist and ‘kitchen-table craft’ champion David Chatt’s Bedside Table (2011), 1982 (2015) and If She Knew You Were Coming… (2015) give intricate texture to bedside objects, household tech and kitchenware.
Of course, this kind of elevated adornment isn’t new. Beads that entered West Africa from Europe via trans-Saharan trade links around the 15th century were used by the Yoruba in Nigeria to make intricate beaded thrones for royalty. One such pair was presented to Queen Elizabeth II during her official visit to Nigeria in 1956, and is now part of the Royal Collection Trust. Contemporary riffs on the piece have lately become a popular sitting-room showpiece (appearing at chic Paris concept store Merci’s Second Residence showcase apartment last year), perfect for use both as art objects and functional furniture.
‘Most people think beads are about fashion, but they’re really about lots of other things,’ sums up Herbert ‘Skip’ Cole, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of California. ‘They have so many meanings.’
Baskets and bangles, masks, aprons, necklaces, bags, tapestries, thrones, throws, dresses, headdresses, shoes, gloves, love letters, fire screens, festive trinkets, bowls, blankets: beads can seed the ornamentation of all sorts of objects. It’s striking, then, that, across the ages, the oceans and all the objects, the process of bead-working has remained so consistent. In every country, you’ll find someone, somewhere, sitting in an open doorway, stringing together the world on a thread.
5000 Years of Beads runs at the National Museum of Antiquities until 7 May 2023.
Details: rmo.nl
