European Glass Trade Beads in Northeastern North America

Abstract

The lives of the aboriginal peoples of northeastern North America were altered enormously following the arrival of ever increasing numbers of Europeans in the sixteenth century. The newcomers brought new tools and technologies, along with new diseases [1], and so, as with many colonists, they introduced a variable mixture of good and bad influences. Non-coastal peoples first traded for European goods with their neighbours to the east. So, before they had seen their first Europeans, many already had European-made copper kettles (or parts thereof), iron knives and axes, and glass beads. While the metals often have severe corrosion problems following storage in hostile environments over the ensuing centuries, most glass beads tend to be better survivors. And, since they are quite variable in shape, size, and colour(s), European-made glass trade beads became distinctive in the sixteenth to nineteenth century aboriginal archaeological sites from which they were recovered, and helped form a valuable archaeological record of economic interaction between aboriginal peoples and the European trading powers. The French were among the first fur traders in northeastern North America. They worked initially in the St. Lawrence River Valley. European-made goods soon moved west to the aboriginal peoples of the Great Lakes. After the colony at Quebec was founded in 1608, the French controlled the fur trade in the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes regions. The arrival of the Dutch-based New Netherland Company in 1614 in what is now eastern New York State, near Albany, introduced a new potential trading source of European goods to the Great Lakes and St Lawrence regions. By 1627, the Dutch traders cemented an alliance with the Five Nations Iroquois who lived to the south of Lake Ontario and who had previously allied themselves with the French. This alliance did not ensure exclusive trading connections for the Dutch, since the Iroquois received less expensive French trade goods from the north well after the British took control from the Dutch [2]. This meant that the French and Dutch