Archaeology Magazine - December 1963 - 37

Glass beads and the tubes from whichthey are made,all actualsize,collectedfrom fieldsin 's Graveland,near NaardenBussum,southeastof Amsterdam.First row on left shows large wound beads in blue and white, probablythe oldest of
the series.Secondrow has five wound beads- the first a pentagonalcylinder,an old form- then six drawn beadswith
coloredstripes,which may show Venetianinfluence.In third row are wound, handmade,beads with wavy lines and
stripes.Fourthrow has drawnbeadsof differenttypes; fifth row, handmadewoundbeads,includingpentagons.Remaining
fiverowsare composedof drawnbeadsand tubes,mostlystriped.

- around Amsterdam one farmer, during forty years'
work, collected several hundred beads and hundreds
of small, short tubes in all colors, remnants of bead
manufacture. A very interesting collection was gathered on one of our North Sea islands, Ameland. Every
Dutch child knows that many an old captain of our
merchant fleet, when he retired' from active service,
built a small house on the island where he was born.
In the gardens and vicinity of these "Commanders'
houses" some hundred old beads were gathered and
can now be seen in the Fries Museum at Leeuwarden.
When I first published facts about the Amsterdam
beads in Panorama (March I960), a Dutch periodical,
I received an interesting response from one of the
Antilles, the small island of St. Eustatius. There hundreds of old blue glass beads have been found in a
spot where in the eighteenth century stood warehouses of the Dutch West India Company. These
warehouses were destroyed by the sea, but the beads
still show the place where they stood. Blue beads of
rather large size, often nearly an inch long, oval or
pentagonal cylinders, these are exactly the same as
those often found in Holland where the refuse of
Amsterdam was used as fertilizer, or where people
probably wore them themselves.
But you need not come so far to find collections of

old Dutch beads. Visit some day the Fort Stanwix
Museum at Rome, New York, or the National Museum in Toronto- they have beads which came from
Indian graves. And that is what they were made for,
for trade or barter with the Indians. The Museum of
the American Indian, Heye Foundation, in New York
has published Beads and Beadivork, by W. C. Orchard. On page 85 the reader will find a photograph
of the pentagonal cylinders of St. Eustatius, but I do
not think they were brought there by Columbus himself but somewhat later by the Dutch. Figure 84 of
the same book shows more beads that may be Dutch
(except the upper row) . The beads in color plate XIII
are certainly not Dutch but most probably of Czechoslovakian make from Gablonz, while the famous star,
or chevron, or Rosetta beads could be Venetian as
well as Dutch. Even small splinters of these beads
might tell us where they came from, for the Venetian
beads are nearly always made of soda glass, while the
Amsterdam factory worked with wood ash and so
made potash glass. Some Amsterdam beads contain
up to twenty-three per cent of potash as K20.
Probably the oldest beads of the Amsterdam series
were large globular, oval and pentagonal cylinders. As
early as 1613, however, Mr. Soop writes in a petition
to the Mayor of Amsterdam that with immense cost
261

Archaeology Magazine - December 1963

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