European beads give new understanding of Indigenous trading economy

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Glass beads made in Europe and found in archeological sites in modern Wisconsin predate European colonization of the area, according to new scientific analysis of the beads.

The finding is evidence of an Indigenous trading economy between Wendat people and the more northerly Anishinaabe people, and it “highlights active Indigenous participation in transatlantic economic networks during a historical period of dynamic reorganization and interaction,” the authors say.

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The research used mass spectrometry of the beads from sites in Ontario and Wisconsin to show they were produced in the same way at the same time in a European glassworks. Differing glassmaking styles leave different chemical signatures, and can be tracked through the history of European glassmaking, from the historic centre of Venice to newer markets for the craft such as Amsterdam and Paris.

And since the European-made beads found in Wisconsin are from archeological sites that predate European colonization of the area, they must have come from the people with the chemically identical Ontario beads, the Wendat.

So when European artefacts like glass beads turn up in First Nations archeological sites, the authors conclude, they are not simply chronological markers of first contact between First Nations and European colonizers. Rather, they are sometimes evidence for a trading economy that spanned much of North America.

This economy was at least wide enough to transfer beads from European traders in the east to other First Nations that were in the Western Great Lakes at the time, particularly the Anishinaabe.

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The authors say their finding shows the error in assuming that wherever European glass beads turn up, that means Europeans also were there at the relevant time.

“That narrative ignores the agency of groups like the Wendat who had established these trade relationships,” said author Heather Walder in an interview. She is an assistant teaching professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse’s department of archeology and anthropology. Her co-author is Alicia Hawkins of the University of Toronto Mississauga.

The paper is published in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity.

It is a meta-analysis of mass spectrometry results on beads from North American archeological sites and European glassworks previously conducted by other researchers, and also new chemical composition analysis of beads from Wendat sites in Ontario and Wisconsin.

In the early 1600s, the Wendat were a confederacy of people in Ontario, called Huron by the French. They were based in southern Ontario until around 1650, when a great disruption, prompted by conflict in Ontario and also disease, caused many Wendat people to move to Quebec, where their descendants live today at Wendake, Que. Others went west to what is today modern Wisconsin, south of Lake Superior, west of Lake Michigan.

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Although French explorers had visited that region, Europeans did not colonize the Western Great Lakes region in earnest until 20 years later.

What that suggests is the Wendat were following established pathways, and that the beads that turn up in this region before this time are there not because some early questing Frenchman found his way there with a sack full of beads, but because Wendat traders had been there, and brought them, trading for furs and other commodities.

“They’re going to where they know,” Walder said of the 1650 Wendat movement.

What this research demonstrates for the first time, Walder said, is a chemical match between beads from Wendat sites in early 17th-century Ontario and beads found in Wisconsin archeological sites with Wendat characteristics such as distinctive pottery and burial practices.

That chemical match effectively proves the Wisconsin beads moved the vast distance from Ontario through a trading economy that was already laid out by the Wendat people and other First Nations before the arrival of Europeans.

Previous archeological interest in glass beads has tended to focus on the timing of site occupations, using the beads as chronological markers. Less interest has been shown to the beads as items with social significance that can explain what Walder described as “questions about interaction, exchange, and community-level relationships among Indigenous Peoples.”

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The people who fashioned beads into culturally significant new objects, or traded them with other First Nations for fur, were not just passive recipients of shiny foreign baubles, but “intermediaries in a larger economic endeavour,” the paper says.

Glass beads “connected the lives of artisans in European glasshouses and European merchants with Indigenous traders and Indigenous consumers,” Walder said.

The paper recounts the history of European glassmaking styles, and how this artisanal knowledge dispersed from Venice to the Low Countries and Paris, partly because of varying levels of freedom for Jewish glassmakers, and also how this style is reflected in the chemical composition of the beads they produced and shipped to North America.

The beads were from sites in Ontario, mainly villages occupied for between and 10 and 25 years in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and 31 sites in the Western Great Lakes, especially near Lake Michigan’s Green Bay.

In all, the study looked at the chemical composition analysis of 1,012 glass artefacts from Europe and eastern North America. From a base of silica from sand, blue beads are coloured with cobalt, turquoise with copper, and white with tin.

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One curious discovery was of a change in colour preferences during this historical period, from an initial preponderance of white and blue beads to an overwhelming Wendat preference for red, which Walder describes as so strong that beads of other colours were sometimes scraped down to reveal red inner layers.

Walder said this research demonstrates that when European trading goods such as beads turn up in First Nations archeological contexts, they sometimes do more than just mark that moment of contact with Europeans. They can also trace pre-existing economies that illuminate the social history of North America 400 years ago.

“Glass beads can show how Indigenous people maintained social relationships and actively moved as strategies of resilience and resistance during the 17th century in the North American Great Lakes Region,” Walder said in a news release for the study. “In short, beads are not (just) clocks! Unlocking their chemical composition using high-tech methods can help us tell stories of the relationships among communities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.”

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