Good Egg - Archaeology Magazine Archive


Good Egg	March 29, 2001
by Lawrence H. Robbins

Turkana women, left, dance in colorful necklaces. The white beads on the woman on the far left are of ostrich eggshell. Finished ostrich eggshell beads, right, made by Turkana people of northwest Kenya (Courtesy Lawrence Robbins) [LARGER IMAGE] [LARGER IMAGE]

Ancient fashionistas of northwestern Botswana would recognize today's local styles. At the White Paintings Rockshelter in the Tsodilo Hills of the northwestern Kalahari Desert, radiocarbon dating shows an ostrich eggshell bead--like those still worn by Botswana's Kalahari San and Kenya's Turkana pastoralists--is 26,460 years old with a 300-year margin of error, placing it among the oldest directly dated beads in Africa.

Excavations at the shelter, conducted in the early 1990s by myself and a Michigan State University team, recovered beads broken in manufacture as well as complete beads and numerous broken pieces of ostrich eggshell, about five percent of which were worked. We found beads in almost every level, from the surface to a depth of nearly six feet. In most cases, beads are assumed to be as old as the radiocarbon-dated layers in which they are found, but in the sandy soil of the Kalahari, such small artifacts can sometimes be intrusive. We therefore sent one of the deepest beads, broken in manufacture before its edges were rounded, for radiocarbon dating using Accelerator Mass Spectometry (AMS). The result, an age of roughly 26,460 years, suggests that the region's ostrich egg craft represents the world's oldest sustained bead-making tradition.

Ethnographic research conducted among the Kalahari San by Polly Wiessner of the University of Utah has shown that ostrich eggshell beads today are a main trade item in a system that forges relationships between distant trading partners. Although we cannot be certain if ancient beads were traded in a similar fashion, there was an increase in the use of non-local stone for making tools during the period when both the oldest beads and the most eggshell fragments appear.