Stone Bead

A stone bead is a ground and polished piece of stone drilled through for stringing. Bell (1980) sorts them into two broad groups: tubular beads, up to about 108 mm long, and globular, barrel or disk beads, from small washer-shaped disks about 7 mm across to globular beads over 35 mm. Some Poverty Point pieces are carved as owls and drilled from the back (Louisiana Division of Archaeology).

Makers ground and polished the stone, often keeping the natural shape of a nodule to save work, which leaves grinding facets. Most holes were drilled from both ends with stone drills until they met, giving an hourglass bore; some long tubular beads have an even bore, which suggests drilling with cane or a stick and sand (Bell 1980). At Watson Brake, Louisiana, chert gravel was flaked to a blank about 13 mm long, ground smooth and drilled with tiny stone microdrills (Saunders n.d.).

In Oklahoma, washer-shaped beads were strung as necklaces, while larger stone beads occur singly or in groups of one to four, as if worn singly (Bell 1980). Poverty Point had a lapidary industry centered on beads, gorgets and plummets (Grooms et al. 2023). The key trait is a ground and polished stone body with a drilled bore, often hourglass-shaped.

Oklahoma: washer-shaped beads about 7 mm in diameter to globular beads over 35 mm; tubular beads up to 108 mm long (Bell 1980; sample size not given). Watson Brake bead blanks about 13 mm long (Saunders n.d., converted from inches). The largest known Poverty Point owl pendant is about 28 mm tall (Louisiana Division of Archaeology, converted from inches).

Eastern North America; best documented in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Watson Brake, Poverty Point) and in early Caddoan sites of eastern Oklahoma (Saunders n.d.; Louisiana Division of Archaeology; Bell 1980). Poverty Point owl pendants, fewer than 30 known, range from eastern Florida to western Louisiana, all surface finds (Louisiana Division of Archaeology).

Look for grinding and polish over the whole surface, often with facets, and a drilled bore. Shell beads show the layered structure of shell; Bell (1980) notes that conch beads copy stone bead forms. Fired-clay beads, also found at Poverty Point, are clay rather than stone (Louisiana Division of Archaeology). A pendant has one suspension hole near an edge rather than a bore through the center (Bell 1980). One Oklahoma tubular bead was ground from a broken stone pipe stem, a reminder to check for old surfaces from an earlier object (Bell 1980). Watson Brake produced 154 finished and 93 unfinished microdrills but only seven chert beads, three with completed holes, all rejects (Saunders n.d.). Gibson (1983) used an older chronology of about 1500–700 B.C. for Poverty Point; the radiocarbon revision by Grooms et al. (2023) places the site at about 3,600–3,000 cal B.P.