The History of Beads
“Westerners tend to think of beads as adornment. In fact, we confine ourselves for the most part to draping them around our necks. Yet, through the centuries, beads have functioned as more than jewelry. They are kaleidoscopic, combined and recombined in an astonishingly wide range of materials; they express social circumstances, political history, and religious beliefs… “Beads have frequently been enlisted as symbolic repositories of sacred knowledge, been deemed to have curative powers, served as the fee for passage to the afterlife, and used as prompters to insure the proper conduct of ritual and prayer. Beads have been the medium of exchange in barter and the standard units of value in market systems… Beads so often mirror the culture of which they are a part that they tell us a great deal about the social, political, economic, and religious lives of the people who have made and worn them,”
- The History of Beads by Lois Sherr Dubin