African Beads

This uniquely designed book and kit with a detachable plexiglass spine contains nearly 2,000 colorful beads and instructions to make a variety of jewelry items while learning about African culture. 100 illustrations.

African Beads: Jewels of a Continent is the first book dedicated exclusively to African-made beads. In detailed chapters organized by material (bone and shell, wood and amber, stone, metal, glass) authors Evelyn Simak and Carl Dreibelbis trace the historical journey of bead making in Africa. Prefaced with an essay by Lois Sherr Dubin and accompanied by 163 color photographs, this magnificent book is a showcase for some of the rarest, most beautiful and most collectible beads in the world.

A riveting story of dislocation, survival, and the power of stories to break or save us. Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were "thunder." In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years wandering through seven African countries, searching for safety--perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive. When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted asylum in the United States, where she embarked on another journey--to excavate her past and, after years of being made to feel less than human, claim her individuality. Raw, urgent, and bracingly original, The Girl Who Smiled Beads captures the true costs and aftershocks of war: what is forever destroyed; what can be repaired; the fragility of memory; the disorientation that comes of other people seeing you only as broken--thinking you need, and want, to be saved. But it is about more than the brutality of war. It is about owning your experiences, about the life we create: intricately detailed, painful, beautiful, a work in progress.

Beads of Life is a fascinating exploration of traditional beadwork from eastern and southern Africa, as well as the socio-religious principles upon which many aesthetic choices were based. The author concludes with an examination of contemporary beadwork as seen, in particular, through the eyes of Canadians from these regions.

Glass beads, both beautiful and portable, have been produced and traded globally for thousands of years. Modern archaeologists study these artifacts through sophisticated methods that analyze the glass composition, a process which can be utilized to trace bead usage through time and across regions. This book publishes open-access compositional data obtained from laser ablation – inductively coupled plasma – mass spectrometry, from a single analytical laboratory, providing a uniquely comparative data set. The geographic range includes studies of beads produced in Europe and traded widely across North America and beads from South and Southeast Asia traded around the Indian Ocean and beyond. The contributors provide new insight on the timing of interregional interactions, technologies of bead production and patterns of trade and exchange, using glass beads as a window to the past. This volume will be a key reference for glass researchers, archaeologists, and any scholars interested in material culture and exchange; it provides a wide range of case studies in the investigation and interpretation of glass bead composition, production and exchange since ancient times.

Catalog of an exhibition held at Smith College Museum of Art, Feb. 1-Jun. 15, 2008.

The beadwork designs of the Zulu-speaking people of southern Africa have evolved from a craft tradition that developed over many generations. Carefully researched and filled with exciting photographs, 'Speaking with Beads' presents jewelry, ornamental headdresses, capes, aprons, beaded panels and other decorative forms.