Atiligauraq is in the Cape Krusenstern National Monument located in northwestern Alaska on the northern coastline of Kotzebue Sound. Atiligauraq is found on the coastal lowlands bordering the Chukchi Sea coast. (See Figures 1 and 2.) According to Ernest Burch, an anthropologist who has done extensive research on the Inupiaq, the group who occupied the territory which includes Cape Krusenstern, the lower portion of the Noatak River, and the Baldwin Peninsula were the Qikiqtagrungmiut (Burch 1998, 189-218; Burch 1984, 303-319). Europeans first identified the Qukiqtagrungmiut as a tribe in 1838 when Alexander F. Kashevarov, an employee of the Russian American Company, explored the area (Bockstoce,7; Burch 1984, 319; Burch 1998, 189-90).
The local family group of the Qukiqtagrungmiut traditionally harvested sea mammals, land mammals, fish, and flora in a seasonal cycle. A seasonal movement pattern was practiced to take advantage of subsistence resources. This seasonal movement pattern included both a change in locality and the consolidation or disbursement of family groups. Dwelling structures throughout the year varied from substantial houses to tent camps. The site at Atiligauraq was typically occupied during early summer breakup. In July, the entire Qikiqtagrungmiut population moved south to Sheshalik for an annual trade fair attended by members of many different Inupiaq groups and, after contact, by increasing numbers of Europeans (Burch 1998, 206-13).
The years of 850 to 1897 are defined by Burch (1984, 314) as the “Period of Destruction” for the Kotzebue Sound people. The increasing contact with American trading vessels spread European diseases. In 1881 to 1883, a famine struck the area and virtually wiped out the Qikiqtagrungmiut and other groups. Many of those who survived the famine emigrated north (Burch 1998, 213-18). Population estimates provided by Burch (1984, 316) indicate a population of 375 in 1800, 400 in 1850, 225 in 1880, and only 100 in 1900. The population did not return to its pre-contact numbers until the 1940s.
The use of glass beads by the people of the Kotzebue Sound region has been documented in several historical sources. The first known recorded visit to Kotzebue Sound by a European was that of Otto von Kotzebue in 1816. Louis Choris, a member of the Kotzebue expedition, painted watercolors of the people encountered in Kotzebue Sound. Both Kotzebue and Choris noted the use of large blue beads on labrets, hanging from ears, and decorating brow bands (Burch 1984, 313; Bockstoce, 88-9; Ross, 11). In 1826 and 1827, Captain Frederick William Beechey and Lieutenant Edward Belcher of the HMS Blossom, conducting explorations fro the Hudson’s Bay Company, collected artifacts from northwestern Alaska (Bockstoce, 2). In reference to the people of Kotzeb ue Sound, Beechey notes labrets of ivory decorated with blue beads and beaded earrings (Bockstoce, 88-9).
In 1789, the Russian government established a native trade fair at Anyui on the Kolyma River. Merchants from Yakutsk traded Russian goods at the Anyui Fair for Alaskan furs traded across the Bering Strait between the Siberian Chukchi and the Alaskan Eskimo (Miller 1994, 18-9). When the Russians founded Saint Michael in 1833, they found the natives already using Russian goods that were traded mainly from “Kolyma through the Chukchi and successive chains of native trading” (Miller 1994, 17). Lt. L. A. Zagoskin, an explorer with the Russian Navy, traveled throughout southwestern Alaska in 1843 and 1844. Zagoskin noted trade routes that carried beads from the Bering Strait north to Kotzebue Sound and south to the Yukon River (Miller 1994, 16-7).
From 1883 to 1886, U. S. Navy Lieutenant George M. Stoney explored the Kotzebue Sound area. In his report, Stoney notes that blue and black beads were a preferred trade item (VanStone, 127). Charles Brower, in his autobiography, The Northernmost American: An Autobiography, writes of an “impoverished Eskimo”, who in the winter of 1884-85 arrived at Pt. Barrow with only one blue bead. He traded this bead fro a sled, five dogs, ten slabs of baleen, five cross-fox skins and one silver-fox skin. Brower valued these goods at more than one thousand dollars (Bockstoce, 89).
Peter Francis (1988a, 82) of the Center for Bead Research, notes that historical evidence indicates the Americans and English who explored the Pacific Northwest were unfamiliar with the blue glass beads preferred in trade. The journal of Captain James King of the Cook expedition to Prince William Sound notes the natives of the area set high value on blue beads that “have not the good shape of English beads, but are manufactured by some nation ruder in this art than ourselves, they are about the size of a large currant berry, & intended to be (but are not ) round . . .” (Francis 1988a, 83). The 1804 Lewis and Clark expedition to the Columbia River Basin had difficulty trading for necessities due to their lack of bringing blue beads for trade. Lewis referred to these blue beads in such high demand and “coarse or common”.
The tree most common methods of bead manufacture are by drawing out a bubble of molten glass into a long tube (drawn), winding threads of glass around a wire (wound), and molding in two-part molds. While in a molten state, glass (a substance of silica, an alkali, a stabilizer and a coloring agent) is highly flexible and can be manipulated while cooling. This attribute of glass allows for a variety of bead shapes.
The drawn method requires two people. The first person gathers a small amount of molten glass on a blowing rod and blows a bubble into it. The bubble is then placed into molten glass to gather more material on the rod. This second gathering of glass can be of the same or a different color. The second person then attaches a rod to the far end of the bubble. The two people move in opposite directions until the glass has cooled and will not pull any farther. The glass rod is placed on wood to cool, broken into short lengths, and then cut into bead size. Before drawing, the bubble can be flattened into shapes, such as triangles, squares, or hexagons. The glass will hold the shape as the tube is drawn out. The tube can also be twisted. After cutting, the beads were often placed in a mixture of sand and ground charcoal, re-heated and agitated to soften the cut edges and round the ends. When cool, the beads were washed and agitated in bags of bran to produce a polished surface. The finished beads were sorted by size in a set of sieves and strung together for sale (Kidd and Kidd, 47-50; Karklins, 88-9, 96-7; Francis 1988b, 4-7; Sprague 87-92).
Wire wound beads, unlike the bulk processing of drawn beads, were made individually. A wire coated with chalk was heated at a flame. A cane or rod of glass was heated at the same time. The threads of softened glass were wound around the wire until the desired size and shape were achieved. This process could also be done with multiple colors of glass (Kidd and Kidd, 47-50; Karklins, 88-9, 96-7; Francis 1988b, 4-7; Sprague 93-5).
Examination under a microscope will normally reveal the manufacturing process. The fibers and bubbles of drawn beads are elongated and run parallel to the perforation. The fibers of a wound bead wind around the circumference of the bead perpendicular to the perforation. The fibers of a wound bead wind around the circumference of the bead perpendicular to the perforation. The bubbles in a wound bead are oval or globular and never elongated (Karklins, 88-9, 96-7).
Glass beads were manufactured in several locations across the world. China began making beads around 1000 BC and was a major bead exporter for centuries (Francis 1988a, 83). It is known that the first beads brought to Alaska by Vitus Bering were Chinese. Three different crew members documented this fact in their journals. American traders also purchased trade beads from China. The Russians were not permitted to bring their ships into Chinese ports; however, trade was allowed through the Mongolian border town of Kiakhta. The Russians later also purchased beads from Yankee skippers, the American Fur Company, and the Hudson’s Bay Company (Francis 1988a, 83; Francis 1988c, 341).
The Venetians began bead production in the 11th century. A majority of the trade beads found in the Americas from the late 1500s to the early 1700s were of Venetian origin. At one time there were nearly 300 glass factories in the Venice area. In 1542 a glass factory was established in New Spain to aid in the high demand for trade beads. The early 1600s saw factories established in France, Spain, Sweden and Holland (Jenkins, 38).
Records indicate a glass factory in Irkutsk manufactured beads from 1782 to 1801. A fire destroyed the records for years past 1801. The surviving records tell us that a majority of the beads until 1790 went to a fur trading company. Two letters from Shelikov, owner of the fur trading company, dated 1792, directed company agents to use the beads in payment for furs (Farris, 2-3). By the early 19th century, Bohemia was producing glass beads for trade. After Alaska was purchased by the United States, packages of facetted blue beads were found in a Russian American Company warehouse. The paper packaging was marked “Brussels” (Miller 1975,20). It is a common belief of bead researchers that these blue facetted beads, often referred to as “Russian,” were not made in Russia.
Peter Francis (1988c, 341) examined beads on items in museum collections and by noting the museum accession dates attempted to correlate different bead types to a particular time period. Francis found that items accessioned in the 1840s contained beads that consisted mainly of irregular seed beads of a semi-translucent medium blue and white coated with clear glass. Items from 1874-86 contained, in addition to the earlier seed beads, opaque red over translucent green Cornaline d’Aleppos from Venice, drawn hexagonals with ground corners in solid blue, blue on white, and amber from Bohemia, and wound translucent blue or red beads with pressed facets. At the turn of the century from 1897-1902, items accessioned contained drawn translucent red over white Cornaline d’Aleppos, blue cornerless hexagonals, and seed beads of mainly deep opaque blue and pure white uniform in size. Though it is unknown at what date these items were made or the beads obtained, we do know they were produced prior to the accession dates. Francis also indicates that cornerless hexagonals, first produced in the 1820s, were not found in the North Pacific until 1874-86. The translucent red over white Cornaline d’Aleppos did not reach the area until 1897-1902.
Data to date indicates the beads from Atiligauraq probably date from the late 19th century or early 20th century, primarily due to a large amount of the translucent red over white Cornaline d’Aleppos that Francis indicates did not reach the area until 1897-1902.
Beck, Horace C.
1927 “Classification and Nomenclature of Beads and Pendants.” Archaeologia 77:1-76.
Bockstoce, J. R.
1977 Eskimos of Northwest Alaska in the Early Nineteenth Century, Monograph Series No. 1. University of Oxford, Pitts River Museum.
Burch, Ernest S. Jr.
1984 “Kotzebue Sound Eskimo.” Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 5, pp. 303-19. David Damas, editor. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.
1988 The Inupiaq Nations of Northwest Alaska. University of Alaska Press. Fairbanks, Alaska.
Chance, Norman A.
1990 The Inupiat and Arctic Alaska. Harcourt Brace.
Collins, Henry B.
1937 “Culture Migrations and Contacts in the Bering Sea Region.” American Anthropologist 39(3): 375-84.
Crowell, Aron
1997 Archaeology and the Capitalist World System: A Study from Russian America. Plenum Press, New York.
Farris, Glenn
1992 “Russian Trade Beads Made in Irkutsk, Siberia.” The Bead Forum 21: 2-3.
Francis, Peter Jr.
No date “Report on the Beads from Reese Bay, Unalaska Island, Alaska: Excavated from a Longhouse in 1986 by Jean S. Aigner of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.”
1988a “Early Russian Bead Trade in Alaska.” Ornament 12(1): 26-7, 82-5.
1988b The Glass Trade Beads of Europe: Their Manufacture, Their History, and Their Identification. The World of Beads Monograph Series, 8. Lapis Route Books, The Center for Beads Research, Lake Placid, NY.
1988c “Beads and Bead Trade in the North Pacific Region.” In Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska, By William W. Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell, pg. 341. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D. C.
Jenkins, Michael R.
1972 “Trade Beads in Alaska.” The Alaska Journal 2(3): 31-9. Juneau, Alaska.
1975 “Glass Trade Beads in Alaska.” The Bead Journal 2(1):23-6. Los Angeles.
Karklins, Karlis
1985 “Guide to the Description and Classification of Glass Beads.” Glass Beads. 2nd Edition, pp. 85-118. Studies in Archaeology Architecture and History, National Historic Parks and Sites Branch, Parks Canada, Environment Canada.
Kidd, Kenneth E. and Martha Ann Kidd
1970 “A Classification System for Glass Beads for the Use of Field Archaeologists.” Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History – No. 1. National Historic Sites Service, National and Historic Parks Branch, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Ottawa.
Klinger, Steve
1997 “Atiligauraq (NOA-284) Archeological Field School, Cape Krusenstern National Monument Threatened Sites Project, 1997 Research Design.”
Miller, Polly G.
1975 “An Historical Explanation of Alaskan Trade Beads.” The Bead Journal 2(2):20-4.
1993 Early Contact: Glass Trade Beads in Alaska. The Bead Society of Central Florida, Altamonte Springs, Florida.
Ross, Lester A.
1997 Russian American Company Fort Ross Apparel Project. http://www.spiretech.com/~lester/ftross/
Shapiro, Elizabeth G.
1988 “Trade Beads Excavated from a European/Konyag Site on Kodiak Island, Alaska.” The Bead Forum 13:7-12.
Sprague, Roderick
1985 “Glass Trade Beads: A Progress Report.” Historical Archaeology 19(2): 87-105.
VanStone, James W.
1962 “Notes on Nineteenth Century Trade in the Kotzebue Sound Area, Alaska.” Arctic Anthropology 1(1):126-8.
Yarborough, Linda Finn
1989 “Glass Beads from the Uqciuvit Site.” Paper presented at the 16th Annual Meeting of the Alaska Anthropological Association. March 3-4, 1989, Anchorage, Alaska.