Post: Post Reply: Gneiss (or Granite or Diorite or...) Beads from Jenne (?) Mali by beadiste

Original Message: Gneiss (or Granite or Diorite or...) Beads from Jenne (?) Mali

In 1997 I purchased a bunch of 20 strands of these beads from a Nigerian trader, the only information being that they were "Mali" beads. Subsequently I learned that the beads were most likely excavated, no doubt from old cemetary sites, and often attributed to the Dogon people.
At any rate, I pulled the box out of storage and entertained my obsessive compulsive tendencies by sorting the beads and re-arranging them into necklaces. The stone types fell into roughly two categories, with two types each. See first photo. The gneiss beads with the dramatic black-and-white pattern are not as well made as the "speckled" and "porridge" beads, and a significant percentage show the curious feature of having been split and re-drilled (the pair of beads upper left in photo), many of them thus flattened and resembling sunflower seeds in shape. I continue to wonder why such an effort was made to re-cycle these beads - did they mean something significant that they were perhaps deliberately split, for reasons?
The hogon necklace that Judy posted in a thread here 15 years ago (see link) features what appears to be one of the "speckled" stone beads, perhaps evidence that these beads were in use at least through the 20th century? In that older thread, one of the replies made some sort of sneering remark about straight holes requiring modern drilling tools, so I thought I'd include here a photo of a small bean-sized bead with two straight holes (only of of which goes through, and has the typical drilled-from-both-ends construction - i.e., the bead was drilled 3 times.
So if anyone here actually knows more about these beads other than they were excavated in Mali, I'd love to hear it. The limited archaeological articles about the Dogon and Jenne/Jenno that I've been able to read feature no stone beads at all - just those glass "nila" beads seem to be deemed worthy of discussion.
(Sorry, I adjusted the pixels to get the pix below the 256K limit, but forgot about the size)
Copyright 2025
All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users

Original Message: Gneiss (or Granite or Diorite or...) Beads from Jenne (?) Mali
In 1997 I purchased a bunch of 20 strands of these beads from a Nigerian trader, the only information being that they were "Mali" beads. Subsequently I learned that the beads were most likely excavated, no doubt from old cemetary sites, and often attributed to the Dogon people. At any rate, I pulled the box out of storage and entertained my obsessive compulsive tendencies by sorting the beads and re-arranging them into necklaces. The stone types fell into roughly two categories, with two types each. See first photo. The gneiss beads with the dramatic black-and-white pattern are not as well made as the "speckled" and "porridge" beads, and a significant percentage show the curious feature of having been split and re-drilled (the pair of beads upper left in photo), many of them thus flattened and resembling sunflower seeds in shape. I continue to wonder why such an effort was made to re-cycle these beads - did they mean something significant that they were perhaps deliberately split, for reasons? The hogon necklace that Judy posted in a thread here 15 years ago (see link) features what appears to be one of the "speckled" stone beads, perhaps evidence that these beads were in use at least through the 20th century? In that older thread, one of the replies made some sort of sneering remark about straight holes requiring modern drilling tools, so I thought I'd include here a photo of a small bean-sized bead with two straight holes (only of of which goes through, and has the typical drilled-from-both-ends construction - i.e., the bead was drilled 3 times. So if anyone here actually knows more about these beads other than they were excavated in Mali, I'd love to hear it. The limited archaeological articles about the Dogon and Jenne/Jenno that I've been able to read feature no stone beads at all - just those glass "nila" beads seem to be deemed worthy of discussion. (Sorry, I adjusted the pixels to get the pix below the 256K limit, but forgot about the size) Copyright 2025 All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users

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