Some observations on stone and glass beads in early South-East Asia

Alastair Lamb, a British archaeologist active in Malaya, published this wide-ranging survey in 1965 to argue that stone and glass beads—long neglected in South-East Asian archaeology—constitute a category of evidence with major implications for reconstructing ancient trade networks and site chronology. Drawing on his own fieldwork across the Malay Peninsula, South Thailand, and South India, Lamb demonstrates that bead assemblages, rather than individual types, are the key to meaningful interpretation, and that the ubiquitous “Roman” beads of the Johore River sites are of far less chronological significance than earlier scholars had supposed.

Summary

Lamb opens by establishing the case for beads as archaeological evidence: they survive in large quantities, are virtually indestructible, and occur across the full range of protohistoric South-East Asian site types, from megalithic cist burials to Dongsonian ship burials to coastal trading settlements. He identifies the methodological problems—no agreed classification scheme, difficulties in describing colour, chemical instability of buried glass—and then proceeds through a series of thematic observations rather than a single unified argument. The stone bead discussion centres on the Indian origin of carnelians and agates, with evidence from Arikamedu showing active manufacture from imported raw materials, and a hypothesis that migratory bead-making castes may have settled in South-East Asia. The mutisalah, the opaque dark red glass bead found in every part of the region, is treated at length: Lamb traces its probable origin to South Indian megalithic and trading sites, documents its manufacture at Arikamedu, and argues that the industry died out in the sixteenth century under competition from European and Chinese bead production.

The chemical analyses Lamb presents (conducted by Australian Consolidated Industries and Eastern Mining and Metals) reveal at least four distinct glass types in circulation: a high-silica, high-soda, low-lead glass of Mediterranean/Middle Eastern character (the material of most mutisalahs and the majority of pre-European South-East Asian beads); a potash variant of the same; a very high-lead glass (40–60% PbO) probably of Chinese origin; and a moderate-lead type comparable to seventeenth-century European crystal. The discovery of punty caps and glass-house debris at Pengkalan Bujang and Kuala Selinsing supports his hypothesis that Middle Eastern glass scrap was imported and recycled into local bead production.

The most sustained argument concerns the “Roman” beads from the Johore River sites. Gardner’s 1937 publication had taken their presence as proof of Roman-era contact with Malaya, a claim that fed into the Ptolemaic “Golden Khersonese” debate. Lamb, following Gibson-Hill’s scepticism, shows that the ceramic context at Kota Tinggi and Johore Lama is firmly fifteenth- to sixteenth-century, that the “Roman” types (zone beads and chevrons) were still being manufactured in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, and that genuine Roman beads could have been collected second-hand from old necklaces or excavated sites in the Levant before export eastwards. The same zone bead, he argues, is a “late Sung or Yuan period Roman bead” at Pengkalan Bujang, a “Ming period Roman bead” at Kota Tinggi, and merely “modern” on the neck of a living Dyak girl.

Key Findings

• Mutisalah beads constituted over 40% of the approximately 8,000 glass beads from Malleret’s Transbassac sites (midpoint c. 500 A.D.), 30% of over 800 beads from Kuala Selinsing, and 30% of nearly 5,000 beads from Pengkalan Bujang (c. 13th century A.D.), but fell below 10% at the sixteenth-century sites of Kota Tinggi and Johore Lama (pp. 96).
• Chemical analysis of twelve mutisalah samples from South India and South-East Asia showed a consistent composition of approximately 50–70% SiO₂, 10–24% Na₂O, and negligible PbO, closely matching Mediterranean and Middle Eastern glass from Philippi and Persepolis (pp. 98–104).
• Polychrome beads were extremely rare in pre-European assemblages: 45 out of 4,525 at Pengkalan Bujang (just under 1%), 100 out of 10,062 at Malleret’s Transbassac sites, but at least 20% at the fifteenth–sixteenth-century Kota Tinggi site (pp. 111, 119).
• A “gold foil” bead from Takuapa, visually identical to specimens from Indian sites described by Dikshit as containing a layer of gold, was found on analysis to contain no gold at all; the metallic effect was produced by the optical junction of two distinct glass layers (pp. 115–116).
• Punty caps (glass-blowing waste) were recovered from Pengkalan Bujang and Kuala Selinsing, alongside fragments of Middle Eastern glass vessels, indicating that imported glass scrap served as raw material for local bead manufacture (pp. 107–108).
• The 1920s Utrecht analysis of a Sumatran mutisalah published a figure of 46% Fe₂O₃, which Lamb notes is implausible for any ancient glass; van Heekeren’s later analysis of a bead from the same find spot (Pasemah) gave a more reasonable 3.52% (pp. 97–99).

Conclusion

Lamb’s definitive takeaway is that individual bead types, however exotic their supposed origin, carry little independent chronological weight; it is the assemblage and its archaeological context that determine date and meaning. The “Roman” beads of Johore, the mutisalahs of the megalithic sites, and the “gold foil” beads of the Philippines are all, in his view, products of a complex and long-running trade in which Indian craftsmen and techniques were exported as well as finished goods, in which Middle Eastern glass scrap was recycled, and in which indigenous consumers maintained a persistent and discerning demand for specific types across millennia. The field, he concludes, remains in its infancy, with too few reliable analyses, no systematic colour statistics, and no study of the modern bead trade to build upon.

Context

• Lamb’s observations are grounded in his own excavations at Pengkalan Bujang (1961), surface collections at Kuala Selinsing (1963–64) and Kota Tinggi, fieldwork at Takuapa, South Thailand (1960–61), and a January 1965 visit to Arikamedu and Kaveripattinam in South India; chemical analyses were commissioned from Australian Consolidated Industries and Eastern Mining and Metals.
• The article’s principal historiographical contribution is the systematic challenge to the “Roman bead = Roman date” assumption that had dominated Malayan archaeology since Gardner (1937), and the establishment of beads as a legitimate and informative category for South-East Asian prehistoric and protohistoric research.

References