Indo-Pacific Beads Prove Ancient India's Global Presence

10-31-2001, 03:55 PM

Indo-Pacific Beads

Small, monochrome drawn (cut from a tube) beads are found at
archaeological sites stretching from Ghana to China, Mali to Bali and
South Africa to South Korea. There has been a lot of discussion about
them and controvery over their name. I coined Indo-Pacific, and that
name is now widely used. The details of this debate and the history
of their discovery are in a box at the end of this article.

These beads were made by a unique method developed in South India
several centuries B.C. It is still in use.

It requires a couple dozen men and women, three furnaces, two of them
unique to the system, and specialized tools. Glassmakers prepare a
large cake of glass by pouring molten glass onto a flat platform. The
cakes are broken up and heated on a shelf adjacent to the unique tube-
drawing furnace (below).

Click Link for a sketch of the unique tube drawing furnace, used to
make the beads, at Papanaidupet.

http://thebeadsite.com/bb-dg-1.gif

When the glass begins to melt it is taken up on two iron-clad sticks
called gedda paru (Tamil for the stick used to stir mud in house-
building) and kneaded into a viscous mass. Then it is transferred
onto a long iron tube called the lada (e) and rolled along a short,
low wall into a cone (f).

The men then pierce the cone by inserting a long iron rod (the
chetleak) through the lada and banging against the base until it
emerges through the apex. The hollow cone on the lada is then
inserted into a high port of the furnace (b). On the opposite side, a
master reaches in with an iron hook, grabs the tip of the cone and
(usually after several tries) begins pulling the cone out into a
tube. He walks back a few meters and pulls the tube out continually,
breaking it into meter lengths as he goes (g).

Some 40 to 50 kgs (about 100 pounds) are worked at a time. The
drawing takes about three hours; there are two masters on each team.
The resulting tubes are chopped between two blades by other workers,
then packed in ash and stirred over heat for 20 to 30 minutes to
round off their sharp edges. They may then be sieved and finally
strung up by women with 15 or so long needles, passing them through
the beads held in a winnowing basket.

There are at least two intriguing unanswered questions about this
technology. For one, the tube-drawing process is very similar in
conception to the machine that Edward Danner of the Libby Glass
Company patented in 1917 to draw glass tubing automatically. (It is
still in operation in much of the world.) For another, the way the
tubes are subsequently processed is exactly the way Venice processed
tubes until the introduction of machines in the 1860s. There is no
question that the Indians were doing this for two millennia or more
before either Venice or Danner. Coincidences?

The waste products of this industry (rather than a large number of
beads), particularly of the tube-drawing step, confirm that
beadmaking was done at a particular site. Arikamedu continued to make
these beads, but in the first century A.D. or so some of the
beadmakers went elsewhere: Mantai, Sri Lanka; Khlong Thom (also
called Kwan Lukpat, "Bead Hill"), Thailand and Oc-eo, Vietnam. Oc-eo
and Khlong Thom were part of Funan, the first state in Southeast
Asia. Their products seem to have enjoyed prestige. Indo-Pacific
beads are found in royal or noble tombs in China (particularly not
yet Sinicized regions such as Annam and Guangzhou), in royal tombs in
Korea (at least in Silla and Paekche ones) and probably in Japan.

When Funan fell apart, the beadmakers apparently moved to its
successor, Srivijaya. They worked at Kuala Selinsing and Sungai Mas,
Malaysia and Takua Pa, Thailand as well as Srivijaya/Palembang
itself. By the time the Sailendra dynasty fell and the capital was
moved to Jambi, Indo-Pacific beadmaking had disappeared in Southeast
Asia.

Most of these centers made their own glass. They did not recycle
Western glass and do not seem to have had a central glassmaker
distributing glass to each site. This I conclude from the analyses
done by Ron Hancock of the University of Toronto for me.

Until the 11th century Indo-Pacific beads were ubiquitous. In the
Philippines they account for 66.2% of all beads of all materials from
all archaeological sites from roughly A.D. 1 to 1200. After that they
virtually disappear (from 1200 to 1450 they account for only 1.2%).
The same pattern is to be seen (though we don't have statistics) in
Sarawak, Java and no doubt elsewhere.

Indo-Pacific beads also went west. Arab traders took them to trade
into Africa; they are found all along the East Coast and Madagascar
and down into the northern Forest Zone of West Africa. The Portuguese
continued the pattern, at least in regard to Mozambique.

It is no exaggeration to say that Indo-Pacific beads were the
greatest trade beads -- perhaps the greatest trade items -- of all
time.

History of their Study and the name debate:

Ivor Evans saw evidence for their production at Kuala Selinsing,
Malaysia in the 1920s. Horace C. Beck, recognized similar beads in
several places, including Great Zimbabwe. Alastair Lamb suggested
there might have been a nomadic group of Indian craftsmen making
these beads in different places in Southeast Asia.

W.G.N. Van der Sleen included them in his "Trade Wind Beads" group as
early as 1956. Although an evocative term, "Trade Wind Beads" was
flawed, as he included all beads brought from Asia to East Africa.
The small drawn beads were there, but so were unrelated types,
including wound beads and stone beads

In 1965 Lamb published a paper describing "mutisalah" beads, in the
journal Man as small opaque red (or orange) drawn beads that were
heirlooms on Timor. He said that were all over Southeast Asia. Van
der Sleen wrote a letter to Man saying that Lamb was wrong; "true"
mutisalahs were wound beads heavy in lead. The problem was neither
understood what a mutisalah was.

Both "Trade Wind Beads" and "Mutisalah" are common in the literature,
the former especially in Africa and the latter in Southeast Asia.
Since both are inappropriate I coined "Indo-Pacific beads" (a shorter
form of my earlier IPMDGB -- Indo-Pacific Monochrome Drawn Glass
Beads). The name reflects the region in which they were made. The
term is increasingly in use.

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