Shell beads from DjRw-14. Large grid is one centimetre, small is one millimetre. Note the interior diameters of less than one millimetre. Picture courtesy of Dr. Terry Clark, CMC. Click to enlarge.
The previous post on the remarkable bead-rich burials in shíshálh territory generated a great discussion including contributions from some of the project leaders. It’d be good to continue that discussion! But one additional point, as Jesse Morin notes in those comments, and as one of the project leaders Terry Clark raised in an email to me, is the question of, quite simply, how are all these beads getting made? As you can see in the picture above, these shell beads have a hole diameter of less than one millimetre. Terry describes some of the holes being not much larger than a human hair!
Northwest Coast Archaeology 