| Notes: |
Introduction and background: Beads are an important component of the wealth, status, and identity of upland communities across parts of South, East, and Southeast Asia (e.g., Francis 1992). These beads are frequently heirlooms intentionally passed on from generation to generation, resulting in beads that may be hundreds and perhaps almost a thousand years old, which remain in circulation. While many of the communities in these upland regions share a tradition of keeping and wearing heirloom beads, there are differences in how beads are viewed and curated within different communities (Francis 1992). In this chapter, we focus on a small group of beads from upland groups in northeast India and Southeast Asia. This upland region is sometimes referred to as Zomia, a region home to diverse groups of ethnic minorities that interacted with and, in some cases actively resisted the lowland states of mainland Southeast Asia (Scott 2009). Some of these groups, such as the Tani, have an oral tradition regarding the origin of their beads. The purpose of the current study is not to challenge this interpretation, but to add another layer to this story through compositional analysis of the beads. In doing so, our aim is to determine the types of glass used to produce the beads and contextualize them within the broader bead exchange taking place within the region.
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