New Bead Cache Reflects Spanish Empire's Might

A cache of 70,000 beads from all over the 17th-century world have been unearthed from Saint Catherines Island, Georgia, a stop along a Spanish trade route between China and the Philippine capital of Manila.

The beads reflect a startling array of shapes, colors, sizes, and materials, hinting at the wide reach of the Spanish Empire in the 17th century, archaeologists report. So far, researchers with an ongoing project funded by the American Museum of Natural History have found roughly 130 different types of beads, some of which include as many as 20,000 samples.

"We also have found perhaps the first evidence of Spanish beadmaking, along with beads from the main centers of Italy, France, and the Netherlands," Lorann Pendleton, director of the museum's archaeology laboratory, said in a statement.

The beads above include a Chinese wound bead in green (top row, middle), a Spanish cross of manganese black glass with waves and dots (bottom right), a potentially French blown-glass bead with greenish-yellow dots (upper right), and a cut crystal specimen thought to be Spanish because of its inferior quality compared with the standard Venetian or French crystal beads of the period (top row, second from left).



The American Museum of Natural History's ongoing dig has focused on the island's mission of Santa Catalina de Guale, inhabited by Franciscan missionaries for much of the 17th century.

Excavating the church's cemetery has yielded most of the more than 70,000 beads found so far. Beaded items were placed in graves to accompany the dead in the early part of the mission's existence. Almost half the beads were found alongside a few individuals, some very young, buried near the church's altar.

"Saint Catherines was a frontier mission, but it also was a bread basket for the east-coast Spanish Empire," the museum's Lorann Pendleton said in a statement. "The missionaries at Saint Augustine [in what is now Florida] were always starving--you can read this in the letters written at the time--because that area was too humid and hot for corn to grow easily. Saint Catherines was able to trade corn for beads.



Most of the beads found while excavating the 17th-century Spanish mission of Saint Catherines have been Venetian in origin, such as the cobalt seed bead (top row, left), of which 20,905 more were discovered.

But some more unique specimens have been unearthed, like the watermelon-shaped blue-green bead from China (top row, second from left), the gilded oval glass bead from Spain (top middle), or the five-layer chevron compound bead from the Netherlands (bottom row, left).

All in all, beads of apparent Chinese, Bohemian, Indian, and Baltic origin have been found on the island off the Georgia coast.