Hundreds of enigmatic shell artifacts unearthed in California's Channel Islands were the product of young people's efforts to imitate their parents, according to a new study on the Chumash Indian bead trade.
Pierced with more than one hole, often positioned at bad angles, the oddly made shell beads relate to North America's largest and most spectacular shell-working business.
The craft specialization, dating back more than 1,000 years and continuing into the colonial period (about 1800), was operated on the Channel Islands, off the coast of southern California, by several hundred skilled Chumash practitioners at any one time.
Most of the shell crafting activity of these Native Americans concentrated on Santa Cruz Island and included ornaments, decorative beads and pendants, and most extensively, shell beads.
Perfectly round, smooth, and precisely drilled, the beads made from the tiny Olivella shell served as currency among the Chumash before the arrival of Europeans in Southern California.
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However, some 320 unusual shell beads unearthed in the past 15 years at two former villages on Santa Cruz's coast, have long puzzled the archaeologists.
Featuring more than one hole, drilled at unconventional angles or too close to the edges, the tiny white artifacts were either dismissed as mistakes or experimental forms made by virtuoso bead-makers.
Instead, the puzzling multi-hole beads, which are nearly 250 years old, appear to be the result of errors made by young, inexperienced apprentices.
"Very likely, Chumash apprentices were learning to make money from their parents, and these were their practice pieces," Jeanne Arnold, a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) professor of anthropology, said.
Chumash bead-making specialists used the hardest portion of the spiral-shaped Olivella biplicata shells for their mint production.
A small sea snail found on sandy beaches, Olivella was first split into three or four fragments. Then bead-makers chipped the fragments into round shapes with stone, drilled the beads with flint tools (metal needles in later times), and strung them on twigs in batches.
Finally, the perimeters were smoothed by grinding the strung batches on an abrasive slab of sandstone.
"The long strings of Olivella beads were ready to serve as a true currency," Arnold wrote in the current issue of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.
A leading authority on Chumash shell beads, Arnold noticed that most of the anomalous beads have two or even three holes. The second holes were drilled even when the placement of the first had doomed the piece to failure.
"The only reason to drill a second or a third hole would be to practice drilling," Arnold told Discovery News.
"It's as though parents didn't want to let children or novices learning the craft waste the chipped shell fragments, so they had them practice making holes over and over again in the same shell," she said.
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Often unfinished, and rarely featuring ground perimeters, the multi-hole beads strongly point to the inexperienced work of novices, according to Arnold.
"The drilled holes on these beads are often incomplete, poorly positioned, and at bad angles, just as one might expect with young learners," she said.
The artisans are believed to have produced the beads just outside their huts.
Indeed the oddly made beads were unearthed at sites where the Chumash lived in thatch-covered, round windowless dwellings on the coastal bluffs of the islands.
"Either through play or imitation, children would make these beads and eventually come to be taken seriously as novice bead-workers," Arnold said.
Photo. Right: Unfinished beads by apprentices. Left: These well-formed, precisely drilled beads were used as currency by Chumash Indians. Courtesy of Jeanne Arnold.
Tags: Ancient Civilizations, Archaeology, Archaeology of the Americas, Native Americans
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