These ones are quite nice. The beads are made in Khwao Si Narin one of the handicraft villages in Surin province in the northeast of Thailand. I think the village was originally famous for its silk, which is wonderful, but a popular silver-smithing industry has developed there too in recent times. Traditionally the silver beads (luk pa keuam), as their name implies were intended as decoration for women's dress, but now necklaces are produced in quite large quantities. Only a few are of genuinely high quality.

To be honest, I think you're more likely to find genuinely antique silver in Chiang Mai.

Cheers,

Will

There I read that they were likely made in what is now Thailand and Kampuchea in the first centuries AD. (I will not quote more, to avoid the risk of infringing copyright rules). Of course, this means SINCE then -- not that all the ones now circulating are that old, specially since manufacturing has been resumed in the XX century.

However, I'm not aware of archaeological evidence from Surin Province of beads like these being found in sites that date from "the first centuries AD." I'd be happy to find out more. But the beads you've shown don't resemble in style or technique any of the gold and silver artefacts that I'm familiar with either from the Dvaravati cultures that flourished there during the second half of the first millennium or from the long period up to the late13th century when the northeast of Thailand was part of the Khmer Empire. All the silver I've seen from those times in the Thai National Museum or the Cambodian National Museum is very intricately made in the manner of the gold jewellery that was used to decorate royal personages and sacred sculpture.

Here are a couple of photos I from an exhibit of Khmer gold that I saw earlier this year in Phnom Penh.

Cheers,

Will