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Ethnographic and historical evidence for glass pendant function in the Plains

The Arikara (Sahnish) were unsurpassed in the manufacture of glass pendants, beads, and effigies made by crushing and re-fusing glass trade beads in the Historic period (Billeck 2013). While native-made glass items are best known among the Arikara, a number of other tribes also made them. Tabeau, Lewis and Clark, Catlin, and Prince Maximilian, all notable travelers and traders to the northern Plains in the nineteenth century, as well as many others, reported the manufacture of objects such as pendants from remelted glass trade beads by the Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa (Abel 1939:149; Catlin 1848:2:261; Moulton 1987:3:315; Witte and Gallagher 2012:158). While these accounts mention the techniques and practices associated with the artifacts, and sometimes describe how the items were made, they rarely consider why indigenous glass objects were produced or how they were used. It was not until much later that James Howard (1972) discussed the cultural context of native-made pendants in the Plains. This chapter builds upon Howard’s research by exploring the ways these objects were used. I demonstrate that they were not solely decorative, but that they had varied meanings in differing cultural contexts. The Native American manufacture of glass items began in the mid to late seventeenth century in the Plains-Midwest area (Billeck 2013). The practice spread to the Southeast and Northeast by the eighteenth century, but was confined to the Plains by the nineteenth century. Flat, triangular-shaped pendants (Figure 1a) with a perforation at the apex were a common form of native-made glass objects, with over 300 known from the United States. About a third of these are attributed to the Arikara. The pendants are an example of how a newly encountered material, glass trade beads, inspired a new native technology and transformed trade items into objects with culturally specific meaning to the Arikara and other tribes (Rogers 1990:74). Pendants were made by forming a wet glass paste into the desired shape on a flat piece of metal (Figure 2) then heating the paste in a wood fire until the glass fused (Gilmore 1924). Archaeological native made glass pendants were recovered on the Plains from late seventeenth to mid nineteenth century contexts. As early as the nineteenth century, glass beads and effigies were also made, but only on the Plains. In the Southeast, Northeast, and Midwest glass pendants are known only from their archaeological presence. The Plains is the only region with historical plains anthropologist, Vol. 61 No. 240, November, 2016, 410–424