These are relatively early recent bead production from the beginnings of production of huge numbers of handmade furnace-wound opaque glass beads in India!
They most likely have large holes with a black residue?

We sold them by weight in my shop in Portobello Road, London in the early '80s, and I bought them from a small importer by the Kilo. I so miss them now!

Yours have an extra refinement of being slightly combed or dragged.

Great beads and so large too. Beautiful beads made in India in the 1970-80's.

Once upon a time I had several of them and every now and then you can find these at a certain vendor in Tucson.

How many kilo's would you like? (grin) There are not too many beads in a Kg.

Thanks to everyone for the pictures of other colors. The India vendor I got mine from only had a few colors in his jar of samples so I only ordered few styles. I never saw samples of the smaller ones. I liked the big ones best anyhow but they were slow sellers, probably because of the big size.

--Russ

I thought the color and veins on those beads looked familar. I kept running the image around in my head until I remembered they looked like these beads. I bought them at the Santa Fe bead show 15 or so years ago. Out of theBlue was there and she told me they were "probably made by some renegade Eastern Indian beadmaker." I had to buy them because of the size and they were appealing even if they weren't that old. It's a huge necklace measuring over 40 cm!

They also made smaller round beads too.

Your necklace shows 5 "Naga for tourists" style headhunter pendants and the other ingredients of interest are the red beads which appear to be like some I acquired in a similar context- opaque red over a white base, as if trying to copy white heart beads but with the materials to hand...

Nice to see you here on bcn! I concur - nice beads - they come up in discussion every now and then. My first ones came from a friend who found them in a folk art gallery in San Francisco in the late 80s. Then we found some with a guy years later who seemed attached to some folklore related to the Naga re. these beads, but we concluded that this was wishful thinking of the seller's part, and done due to the long Naga shell beads of similar dimensions. Also, these usually have some pseudo-aging on them.

Joyce, I dont think anyone has to do anything with these beads to make them appear old, the glass is cheap and acquires a grubby surface all by itself...

Hi Stefany,

When these beads entered the market in 1974 they were routinely very shiny and new-looking. (Now, thirty-five years later, my beads still look like this.) It was a few years later that someone decided they could be used in fake Naga constructions, whereupon they were usually said to be "old." To make this more plausible, the beads were matted and dirtied.

The idea that they became this way 'through use' buys into the false notion that these beads have had some history of use. They were made in factories, and exported, and sold under false pretenses.

I am reasonably sure their condition (surface characteristics) is contrived.

Jamey