Beads Connect People: Applying Glass Chemistry to Investigate Relationships among Seventeenth-Century Wendat Communities

Abstract Across many global contexts of colonial interaction, glass trade beads serve a cultural role as social signifiers and gifts that solidify relationships among people and communities. Through frameworks of technology studies and communities of practice, this study examines how glass bead manufacturing processes in historical European production centers left identifiable markers of access to exchange networks across eastern North America. The case study uses laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) to characterize the composition of 413 glass bead chemistries from 13 archaeological sites associated with four distinct nations of the Wendat confederacy. The sites represent both large centers and smaller villages inhabited during the first half of the seventeenth century. We demonstrate that Wendat people from communities of different sizes obtained polychrome and monochrome glass beads made in multiple European glasshouses, with distinct technological styles, likely located in Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, and/or Rouen, and other cities and towns. The finding highlights both the powerful meaning of beads as adornment items and the interconnectedness of European producers and Wendat communities in Wendake yehen’, the location in present-day southern Ontario where the study is centered.