Material histories of African beads: the role of personal ornaments in cultural change (original) (raw)

2021, Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity: A Global Perspective

Africa is the continent that provides the longest track record of personal ornaments, back to the earliest use by our hominid predecessors. Beads made of marine shell, ostrich eggshell, stones, and later glass appear consistently in Africa's archaeological record from the Middle Stone Age onward, and have long been linked with indexing ethnic and interpersonal identity (Bednarik 2001, 2008; McBrearty & Brooks 2000; Sciama and Eicher 2015). As one of the most enduring artifacts in human history, beads have served in cultural, cognitive, and communicative systems of language, art, and symbolism. Beads have played a central role in ethnographic studies, which have explored the range of cultural signals and meaning among various groups (Klumpp and Kranz 1992; Leach and Leach 1983; Malinowski 1922; Trubitt 2003). Yet, their role in social change is less explored. This chapter is framed around two African contexts: first, in northwest Kenya, where the first pastoralists buried their loved ones and community members with brilliantly-coloured stone beads underneath megalithic monuments 5,000 years ago; and second at the edge of the Kalahari in Botswana, where 1,000 years ago and 1,000 km inland, societies used glass beads coming from India and the Middle East to index increasing inequality. In both situations, beads played a role in the ways these past African societies understood their lives at key moments of transformation: here, animal domestication and early monuments, and proto-global trade and stratification. Importantly, these societies—and their use of beads as personal ornaments—should not be conflated. The goal of focusing on two case studies is to demonstrate the breadth of the uses of beads in various historical processes, while providing enough depth within each example to examine the varying roles these material objects played. ***Please contact for chapter off-prints***