A Brief History of Beads

“Bead (noun):From the Middle English bede; meaning prayer or prayer bead: From the Old English bed gebed; prayer, akin to the Old English biddan; to entreat, pray.  Originally the word meant ‘a prayer’.  The number and order of a series of prayers were kept track of with the aid of what is today called a rosary, a string of variously sized small round balls.  Because each of these balls stands for a particular prayer, the name bede, Modern English bead, was transferred to the balls themselves.  Today bead is used to refer to any small piece of material pierced for threading on a string or wire.” Merriam Webster’s Deluxe Dictionary

Beads have been made from all sorts of materials ranging from the natural ones such as seeds, stone and shell, to the man-made materials of ceramic, glass, and, most recently, plastic.  They were worn as amulets or charms because of their supposed magical properties and as decoration simply because they looked nice.  They have also been used as objects of exchange, their size making them easily portable, as far back as the Egyptians who traded with the people of the African continent.  Their best known use as objects of exchange is, of course, right here in North America where European settlers gave glass beads to Native Americans “in exchange for” property.

The first glass beads appeared at the same time as the discovery of glass by the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Sumerians around 30 centuries ago.  The Egyptians used these beads to make beautiful collars, some of which can still be seen today in museum collections.  The African people, who traded with the Egyptians, used beads to make items that were worn as tokens of social status, political importance and for personal adornment and they were valued because they were the product of an exotic, unknown (at that time) technology.

Native Americans made, and still make today, beads of natural materials such as bone,stone (semi-precious ones like turquoise) and shell as they did long ago, before the European settlers came.  Before the glass seed beads, native women would use softened, flattened, dyed porcupine quills for appliqué work on buckskin (quillwork is seeing a revival today) and it was often done as a kind of prayer for someone.  When the women received the first seed beads, which they called “little spirit seeds, gift of the Manido (spirits)”, they gladly gave up working with the difficult and not so flexible porcupine quills.  Three of the techniques that I will be looking at; loom beading, single-needle (peyote) beading, and appliqué embroidery, were invented by native women for working with seed beads.  The fourth technique, dreamcatchers, is not technically beaded when done by native artisans, but it can be done that way.

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