Raw or recent copal
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Posted by: Rosanna Post Reply
09/03/2016, 17:25:51

I received five beads from Nora to look at, and with a little sniffing and digging here's what I came up with.

Four of the beads with similar color (see pix) had a very strong aromatic smell when I used my bead reamer to ream the holes and sniff the sawdust. I'm pretty sure the scent is myrrh - I have a bottle of myrrh essential oil for comparison. If you check the Wikipedia article on myrrh you will find that the sap from the myrrh tree is harvested in East Africa. Myrrh oil is extracted of course, but these beads seem to be made from raw sap and maybe something else to hold the material together.

Jamey Allen's article from 1976, "Amber and its Substitutes. Pt. II Mineral Analysis", in The Bead Journal, Vol. 2, Issue 4, has a discussion of copal that is relevant to these beads. He lists two types of copal - "true copal", which is a semi-fossil, otherwise called "young amber", and raw or "recent copal", which is the sap of living trees. Jamey also said he was unable to find any firm information about native bead manufacture from recent copal.

The fifth bead smelled like turpentine, so it is clearly a different tree sap. Just browsing around the web, it appears that many trees in Africa are harvested for their sap, so it's not a stretch to conclude that many different tree saps are formed into beads. Probably without doing more investigating all over Africa we wouldn't know for sure exactly what trees are commonly used.

So, bottom line, I learned something, which is that recent or raw copal is the correct term for beads that are made from raw tree sap. The label in the Picard Museum, "African copal" is therefore a good description; maybe "African Raw Copal" would be better as it distinguishes the semi-fossil version from the recent.

Thanks Jamey - and I hope you will post scans of your 3-part paper online someday - it was difficult to get copies but the San Francisco Main Public Library has The Bead Journal in its archive.

RFNoraCopalSep2016a.jpg (31.6 KB)  RFNoraCopalSep2016b.jpg (33.7 KB)  


Modified by Rosanna at Sat, Sep 03, 2016, 23:32:33

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