Paper short abstract:

I discuss recent research on glass beads from Aboriginal Australia focusing on museum and archaeological examples from the Top End in the 19th and early 20th century; and demonstrate the importance of anthropology in such investigation in creating greater understandings of global trade networks.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at two sets of glass beads held in the collections of the Australian Museum in Sydney that were recovered from an excavation and the surface of rock shelters at Oenpelli (now Gunbalanya) in western Arnhem Land during the American Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. While much has been written about the AASEAL, for example,the volume "Barks, Birds and Billabongs " (2009:ANU Press), this rare and extraordinary find has received no attention. The Australian Museum's register states two blue glass beads were dug up by Frank Maryl Setzler, the Expedition's Deputy Leader and archaeologist at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, with Fred McCarthy from the Australian Museum in October 1948. A set of 8 glass beads were collected from the surface of another site at Oenpelli by McCarthy. So what is the importance of what may appear to be small and somewhat unremarkable things? This paper seeks to place these beads within the broader context of the use of glass beads in western Arnhem Land through an investigation of museum objects and historical images. While at the same time how these beads came to make their way to Australia is part of a broader investigation of global networks of exchange, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when glass beads were central to this economic and colonial global trade. The paper further considers the importance of anthropology in interrogating museum objects and in being part of an emerging area of interdisciplinary research.