Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology

Replicative experiments provide opportunities to assess aspects of past behaviors that are not materially evident. I replicated the Olivella bead-making process to determine the time required to make the various types of Olivella beads that were common during different times in California prehistory. Beads were made using traditional tools and materials. Methods were based on both ethnographic accounts and analysis of archaeological bead-making evidence. The experimentally-derived measurements quantify the production, conveyance, and consumption of shell beads as measures of the time/energy investments they represent, converting bead counts into a ìcommon energetic currencyî (Rosenthal 2011:85). This provides a means for (1) quantitative economic analyses of bead wealth between different temporal and spatial contexts, and (2) comparisons between non-subsistence behaviors represented by beads, and subsistence-oriented efforts that are generally measured as time/energy expenditures. Converting beads into time-investment opens the door to novel approaches to assessing changes in the past.