Decorated Agate Beads - Although early archaeology called these "etched agates," we know this was a mistaken interpretation. I prefer the designation "chemically decorated stone beads," or just "decorated agates." The processes for making these beads was pioneered in the Indus Valley civilization, at Harappa, in ca 2,500 BCE. Horace Beck, in his pioneering article on these beads, defined three main periods of production: Early (ca. 2000 BCE); Middle (roughly the Roman Period); and Late (now known to encompass Sasanian and Islamic Period). Needless to say, the second we saw that there were decorated stone beads included among Pyu beads, I felt this would give us some reasonable idea of the general dates for the entire group. And what I saw suggested the Middle Period more than anything else. This was confirmed a few years later, when we came to understand these were Pyu beads

In his original article, Beck described three types of decorated agate beads. Type I (the most common sort) has white lines on a red or black ground. (Beck mistakenly believed that these ground colors were "natural," though we now know the carnelian was at the least heat-treated, and the black resulted from carbonization.) He described "Type II" beads as resulting from painting the whole bead white, and adding black lines. (This is another problematic assertion, that makes his classification system inadequate, but makes it easy to spot these beads in any group.) In his lifetime, Beck only saw about a dozen specimens of these beads--so he can be forgiven for making possibly a rash interpretation of the technology. Finally, at the time he wrote, in 1933, Beck had seen a single specimen he called a "Type III," in which a carnelian bead had black lines on a red ground. In viewing the Burmese beads, another thing that intrigued us was the fact that the group included quite a few specimens of the more rare "Type II" and "Type III" beads--many more than Beck had been able to see in his whole life. Let's look at some specimens.

The photograph below shows simple stripe and zigzag designs. These might have been made at any time between ca. 2,500 BCE and CE 1000, but they are at-home in the Roman Period as much as anywhere. However, note the "Type II" "black-on-white" bead (row one, number three) and also the "Type III" "black-on-red" bead (row two, number five), that we'll discuss shortly. And note also that several beads have yellow lines, rather than the typical white or off-white lines of most such beads.

In the next photograph, we see three beads that have simple line patterns. Longitudinal on the left, and around the circumference on the right and below. Note also that the upper beads are of the much more rare "Type II" (as named by Beck), that appears to have black lines on a white ground. The lower specimen is an even more rare "Type III" with black lines on red carnelian

I mentioned that a lot of the Pyu beads were types easily compared to pumtek beads, that in the 1980s came to us from Mizoram, India. The Pyu beads are much smaller than the majority of typical pumtek beads--and unlike pumtek beads consist of a variety of stones, including white agate and a more yellow material (whereas the nonprecious opal of pumtek beads is a buff or tan stone with the texture or pattern that reflects its origin in being fossil palmwood). I refer to the Pyu beads as being "proto-pumtek" beads. The eighteen beads seen below present the most common spherical shapes, with longitudinal lines, seen in both groups. Note also the specimens with yellow-orange lines, and that the ground colors vary from brown to black.

In this detail photograph of six beads, we see the previous style close-up, as well as a bead with horizontal stripes (equatorial rings), and two with diamond-shaped figures. Again, the ground colors are very black.

The four beads below are similar, though decorated with yellow lines. And we can see that the left specimen has a geometrical net pattern?well known from many Middle Period (Roman times) beads.

In this detail, we can see a single proto-pumtek, that is brown with yellowish circles. This is a rare but documented pattern for pumtek beads.

In this shot, we see two specimens that again mirror the patterns seen in later pumtek beads, as well as Tibetan zi beads--consisting of parallel zigzags, flanked on the ends by a plain band or ring.