Recently, while looking at the reproduction beads made by other beadmakers, I am struck by a sort of thread running through some of the descriptions. There is a sort of concensus that beads don’t have to be well-made because a number of artefacts are badly made, there is a bias towards making beads that are slightly wonky or etched or something that would not be best practice if they were making contemporary beads. Why? It may be true that old beads look… well… old. They’ve been buried in some pretty grotty conditions, dead bodies and all, but no one who owned them when new would have been happy with beads that were barely adequate to the job.
Of course, not every modern beadmaker is top of the class, but to take hard-earned skills and then make lousy beads because of a perception that historic beads are somehow shoddy or less well-made is silly and misleading to the people who know nothing about historic beads, and presume that every bead should be etched, or wonky or just plain crap.
If that is so, then why are there beads that still challenge modern beadmakers? Why are there beads that are so difficult to make with modern tools that they are almost unavailable? Of course, it’s all a bit of marketing, really, this ‘ancient beads can’t be well-made’, but don’t believe it. It’s an insult to those who led the way for us.