Beads and boundaries

The aims of this paper are quite simple - to provide information about the different classes of ethnographically-known beads and pendants and their distribution across Australia in relation to the natural boundaries of drainage basins. In the explosion of interest in beads and pendants dated to the Late Pleistocene, much of the work has been concentrated on methodological issues (White 2007), or finds from individual sites (e.g., Blombos: d'Errico et al. 2005; Henshilwood et al. 2004) or comparisons of archaeological finds over a wide geographic scale (e.g., Vanhaeren et al. 2006; Vanhaeren and d'Errico 2006), or with theoretical arguments developed to fit scenarios relevant to these sorts of finds (Balme and Morse 2006; Kuhn and Stiner 2007; Stiner 2014). For a review of the historical contexts of the study of beads and ornaments and changes in approaches, see Moro and Nowell (2015). By contrast, relatively little has been written about the contemporary variation in beads and pendants on a continental scale based on detailed analysis of a large body of materials. LM undertook an analysis of the beads and pendants from all over Australia and held in Australian museums, culminating in a PhD thesis in 2008 (McAdam 2008). In this paper, the main purpose is to provide a description of the samples included in that analysis, the classification used, and the distribution of specimens in the different classes. The paper concludes with a few remarks about the significance of those distributions. It is complementary to the chapter by Akerman in this volume which deals with specific individual finds and ethnographic accounts of them.