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A Bead Too Far: Rethinking Global Connections Before Columbus
As a historian of exchange, I am conscious that goods that travel long-distances, are shiny or unusual get all the glory: a lot of history is mundane, low-key and local.
The findings, reported in American Antiquity by Michael Kunz and Robin Mills reveal the presence of so-called ‘IIa40’ glass trade beads - uniformly turquoise blue, slightly translucent, and finished by the a speo technique, a Venetian process that didn’t exist elsewhere in Europe in the Middle Ages. If confirmed - and every piece of analysis to date points to the beads’ authenticity - this would represent the earliest physical evidence of European material culture in the Western Hemisphere, predating any transatlantic crossing - other than the well-known Viking finds from Newfoundland. Into this matrix - long before Columbus set sail - went tiny glass beads, carried by merchants, exchanged at border outposts, handed from one community to another, until they arrived, improbably, in the frozen tundra of northern Alaska.
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