Theorising beads: Beads as material culture in southern Africa

Upcoming conferences for 2014

Well, I’m trying to get a schedule of conferences together for 2014, and have so far sent abstracts off to two of them

The proposal, or abstract is: 

A new archaeology of glass beads in southern Africa, 500-1200 CE

Robert Thornton (Anthropology, Wits University, South Africa)

Jonathan Thornton (Art Conservation, Buffalo State College, USA)

Our experimental reconstruction of glass bead technologies, OLM, SEM, EDS, and XRF studies of their internal structure, ethnographic evidence, and reanalysis of archaeological materials, provides a basis for a radical reinterpretation of the origin, trade, and production of glass beads in the archaeological record.  According to the current standard interpretation, glass beads were all traded into southern Africa from a few sources in the Indian Ocean (‘Trade Wind’ beads), Egypt, and/or the Middle East, and they were all either ‘wound’ (on a mandrel) or ‘drawn’ (as tubes from a molten mass of glass).  In addition, it has been argued that beads constituted ‘wealth’ for class-stratified, agro-pastoral societies. For instance, micro-structural evidence shows that some (many?) beads were made of sintered powdered glass, not ‘wound’ or ‘drawn’.  Experimental reconstruction of possible early pyrotechnologies shows that glass could have been manufactured from raw materials plentiful in the southern African areas where glass beads are found, and experimental reproduction of glass beads that strongly resemble archaeological beads at K2, Mapungubwe, etc., show that glass and glass beads could have been produced locally, possibly at many sites across southern Africa, and probably were.   Re-analysis of ethnographic and historical evidence shows that beads in African societies were primarily used in ritual and healing, rather than as wealth or currency.  This leads to new understandings of historical trade patterns and of social structures in first millennium African societies implying, for instance, that Indian Ocean trade in glass beads was multi-sited and reciprocal, involving societies structured around sacred sites with ritual-technological specialisation, rather than (or in addition to?) class stratification. 

The second paper-to-be is proposed for the Association for Social Anthropology in Edinburgh, in June.  

The proposal is: 

Human sexuality and human origins: The occlusion of sex and the exclusion of social anthropology from the human evolution debate

Robert Thornton, Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand

Summary

We must include a distinctly human sexuality with tool-making, fire, language, etc., in the original human skill set that made the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens possible.  The lack of an adequately anthropological theory of sex has excluded social anthropology from debates on human origins.

Long Abstract

The emergence of the ‘human’ from hominidae, and of ‘human nature’ from nature, must surely have involved the emergence of a human sexuality from a ‘natural’ sexuality.  Paradigms rooted in Christian theology and Darwinian evolution have precluded the conceptual separation of human sex/uality from reproduction, and have therefore prevented social anthropologists from engaging usefully with the human origins debate.    A distinctly human sexuality, however, can be clearly distinguished from the sex/uality of other mammals by re-envisioning sex as a distinct form of social action/agency, and by recognising that, for humans, sex and reproduction are different forms of (social) action, even as they are often culturally conflated. Many Enlightenment debates revolved around the utility and rationale for ‘marriage’ as a sort of proxy for human sexuality, even as they necessarily failed to grasp the significance of the sexual.  I argue that the emergence of a specifically human sexuality, together with tool-making, fire, language, etc., in the original human skill set, was one of the enabling conditions for the emergence of humanity per se.  If the emergence of a distinctly human, culturally-configured sexuality can be seen as part of the original human skill set, then sex (as social action) had already separated itself from reproduction (and therefore natural selection).  This perspective allows social anthropology to re-enter the discussion of human origins, and provides new perspectives on the relation between sex, religion, and human evolution. 

Making glass--experimental archaeology for southern African materials

My first home made glass.

Doesn’t look like much at the moment, but this is a photo of a cross section of the first glass that I made from quartz and soda carbonate flux, approximating the basic glass recipe.  It was made in the back yard, literally, on a charcoal fire with a forced draft.  It proves that glass can indeed be made quite easily from locally, even universally available materials, and that it is not particularly hard to make glass. It has always been said in the historical literature, and still is, that glass was so difficult to manufacture initially from raw materials that it must have been made only in a very limited number of places, and that the raw glass, once made, was traded or shipped all over the world, or all over trade networks within whatever limits.  This seems not to be true.  Certainly, one has to know how glass CAN be made, and HOW it can be made. It requires a craftsman who is skilled with high temperature technologies such as metal smelting, melting, casting, or working, but apart from that the materials are universally available.  

•   Especially important is the fact that the quantities of inputs--the recipe--seems to be relatively unimportant.  The glass forms as the fluxed silicon dioxide gradually melts and seems to form eutectic substance as the sodium ions and other ions reach saturation points in the silicon dioxide solution, and excess materials either never dissolve into the substance at all, and remain unchanged, or crystallise out of the glass solution.  

• )b carbon dioxide form throughout the glass initially.  The way these eeliminated, it appears, is by allowing the first formation of glass (what I made, anas in the picture above) to cool, regrinding it, and melting the eutectic mixture, now with the volitile component already removed, to melt again. This give a relatively bubble-free glass.  Thus, large numbers of bubbles in the glass probably indicate that the glass is made directly from raw materials and has not been reground.  Typically, the second melt would also include cullet, or ‘scrap’ glass from broken vessels in the melt.  this assists in the melting and provides a better glass with fewer inclusions and bubbles.