Archaeology Magazine - December 1963 - 36

Bead

Seventeenth-

-Making

Amsterdam

Century

By W. G. N. VAN DER SLEEN

Most Americans know that in the middle of the
seventeenth century the Indians sold Manhattan Island
to Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor, for a few
commonplace trinkets, including two strings of blue
beads. But few people are interested in what kind of
beads these must have been! I found the answer to
this question in the beautiful forest planted 350 years
ago in what are now choice residential towns, Hilversum and Bussum, some twenty miles from Amsterdam. This find answered so many other questions too
that I think it worthwhile to publish here the result
of my investigations. And as it may be interesting to
know how I came to my conclusions, I will tell you the
whole history as it happened.
At the end of the sixteenth century Amsterdam was
no longer a small fishing village, but was growing
fast and becoming a busy, rich town. Large houses
had to be built for the merchants who sent out ships
under the flag of the Dutch East India Company and
saw them come back with the riches of the Far East.
Amsterdam was not built on rock, however, but on
peat- moist, grassy land where heavy objects used to
sink, not quite in bottomless depths, but in moors and
swamps. Houses were built on wooden poles or stilts,
or sand had to be brought in to make streets along the
canals. This sand was shipped from the low hills in
an area east of the city. The VIP' s of those daysTromp, our famous admiral, Hooft the historian,
Huygens the physicist, Rembrandt the painter, Vondel
the poet- nearly all the great figures of our Golden Age
- wanted to build hunting lodges or summer houses
for their wives and children in the healthy surroundings of the heather and pinewoods where the sand had
come from. But it is difficult to make a nice garden
in sand, and so very soon the ships that at first had
come empty to fetch sand from the hills were used to
bring the waste and refuse of the town, which was
already known to be good fertilizer. But, sad to say,
the Dutch, if they want to get rid of something, just
throw it in the canal! So with the mud from the canals,
260

which was good fertilizer, there came into the suburban gardens and the forest lanes everything that a
rich mediaeval town wanted to get rid of- bits of
Chinese porcelain, broken jugs of German stoneware,
pipe stems and pipe bowls some of these so small
that it seems they must have been used when tobacco
was very scarce and expensive. All these things can be
dated. We have tobacco pipes made in 1610, while
the last of the small ones were made around 1650.
Stoneware is often dated, showing the dates 1630 or
1640 around the Amsterdam coat of arms. Some
young scientists found broken and malformed glass
beads and a lot of small glass tubes of all colors, the
material which beads are made from. They came to
me, as I had just published some notes about beads
from South Africa and from the Indian Ocean, and
that is how I found a new field of investigation right
outside my door.
It is a well known fact that glass, in the form of
bottles, wine glasses, beer glasses, etc., was manufactured in the Netherlands as early as the sixteenth century in Middelburg and later in many other towns.
But museums and private collections do not show the
specialties of a few factories, particularly in Amsterdam, that is, glass beads. They are mentioned, however, in Professor F. W. Hudig's book, Das Glas
(Vienna, 1923), where he points out that Hendrik
Carelsz and Soop made what was called paternosterwerke, meaning differently colored beads used, for
example, for rosaries, but perhaps more specially for
trade and barter with uncivilized peoples. Happily,
such beads and the refuse from their manufacture
were found not only near Hilversum but also around
Hoorn, Velzen, Haarlem and many old towns and,
last but not least, in the heart of Amsterdam. Here, in
excavating for foundations of new buildings at Keizergracht 292, not only were remains of glass from bead
manufacture found but even part of furnaces! Quantities of old beads were found, wherever polders dried
out and where vegetable gardens required cultivation

Archaeology Magazine - December 1963

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - December 1963