HISTORY on a string

The Bead Museum in Washington’s Penn Quarter gets about 8,000 visitors each year. How can there be so much interest that a museum can be devoted entirely to beads?

First, the museum is housed in a single room, and second, beads play a much more important role than most people think, says Hilary Whittaker, vice president of the museum board.

“Beads are the oldest artifacts of mankind,” Ms. Whittaker says. “After feeding and sheltering were taken care of, people started to develop adornments that said, ‘I’m rich,’ ‘I’m a farmer,’ or what have you,” she says. “The beads were a form of identifier.”

Ms. Whittaker says the first known beads are about 70,000 years old and were found in South Africa. Later, beads started appearing elsewhere, such as shell beads in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. Other materials used in these early beads include soft, natural materials such as soapstone.

As cultures got more advanced, artisans learned to drill and polish harder materials to create beads, says James W. Lankton, a bead researcher who put together the museum’s temporary exhibit “Bead Timeline of History,” which will continue through March.

“The production of beads tells us something about the level of technical skill — advancement — in a culture,” says Mr. Lankton, who was a practicing anesthesiologist before he began devoting himself to bead research full time. “[Researchers] have found a type of diamond polishing in China from about 4,000 years ago, which is pretty remarkable.”

Another popular bead material in China was jade. The exhibit shows some examples of Chinese jade beads that are about 5,500 years old. They feature the characteristic dragon design.

“We think the dragon design might have appeared in bead design first,” Mr. Lankton says.

A little later, about 3,500 years ago, man-made materials such as glass started being used, he says.

The timeline exhibit, which features hundreds of beads varying in size from 2 millimeters (.08 of an inch) to about 15 centimeters (6 inches), shows that beads get more and more elaborate the more recently they were made.

In ancient Rome, intricate face beads started appearing, in 15th-century Venice, chevron beads — colorful beads made of several layers of glass — were made and took the world by storm, Mr. Lankton says.

“These were probably the type of beads that Columbus had with him to the New World,” he says.

Aside from the production aspect, beads also can reveal a lot about a culture, he says.

“Consumption — who wore the beads — tells us about things like status in society; and exchange — as in trade — teaches us about things like trade routes,” he says.

The last two cases in the timeline exhibit hold contemporary beads, some elaborate, some humorous. There is a bead with a Marilyn Monroe portrait inside it; another looks like a miniature aquarium with exotic fish; a third mimics the shape of an African fertility goddess.

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