| Original Message: fossil beads from Cambodia |
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Hi Everyone, I spent more than a month earlier this year in some fairly remote villages in northern Cambodia. My partner was working, so, in between running errands for her, I got to hang out with the local ne'er-do-wells. It was the dry season, post rice harvest, so there wasn't a lot of farm work going on, and some of them had been digging up some ancient burial sites. Of course, they were hoping for Khmer Angkor-period bronze which they would be able to sell to dealers. Ever since the civil war more or less ended there has been a plentiful supply of metal and mine detectors in Cambodia, and these have been a great stimulus to illegal "archaeology". But the graves my friends had found pretty much by chance were older, pre-Bronze Age, and they had simply thrown away most of what they had dug up. However, they had kept a necklace of fossil beads, and one rather drunken evening they decided to give it to me (that day I had driven their rice to market in the back of our truck). I haven't been able to find out very much about beads that are fossils. There's quite a bit about beads that are made from fossilized materials (pumteks are the most famous), but the only other whole fossils I've seen pictured are in Lois Dubin's book, especially a somewhat similar necklace on page 20, which is dated to 28,000 BCE. That's much earlier than these would be; all I can say about their date is that I take them to be more than 3,000 years old (as beads, that is!). There's nothing in any official archaeology report from Cambodia about any similar beads, but they may be too unimportant to be mentioned, and perhaps there are a lot of them around without my knowing it. I know nothing about fossils. There's a lot of Triassic (I think) limestone in the area. The larger beads are some kind of bivalve; the largest is a bit over 4 cms. The smaller disc-type beads (about 13-14 mm), which at first glance I thought were simply shell, seem to be fossils too. I've seen some fossil coral which is slightly similar, but nothing quite like this. They're actually very interesting in their formation; they appear to have been laid down in layers, with serrated edges produced by radiating "spoke-like" patterns. Mostly the beads are split along the layers, but sometimes the beads are composed of more than one layer. I'd really appreciate any comments or information, and as usual I apologise for the pics. I'm struggling with focus (as in other areas, too!). Best regards, Will All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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