Tube Beads

The 11 tube beads from the Fredricks site were all recovered from the chest area of Burial 4, which was a bundle burial containing a male adult and an infant. The tubes were found lying together in parallel order on the adult's chest. The nine tubes that were complete ranged in size from 105-123 mm in length and 6.0-7.4 mm in diameter. Their hole diameters ranged from 2.0-2.7 mm. These measurements demonstrate the uniformity of these tubes. On none of them is the silca groove very apparent, unlike tube beads found at earlier sites. No doubt the use of a metal drill enabled the artisan(s) of these historic tube beads to produce a much more refined product with much less energy expenditure; however, even so some evidence of the groove should be apparent no matter how narrow the tube given the depth of this groove on other tubes from the area.

These historic tube beads actually resemble the hair pipes used by Plains Indians which were manufactured commercially by Dutch settlers in Bergen County, New Jersey, from the West Indian conch, Strombus gigas (Ewers 1957). These tubes were made from the thick lip of the outer whorl of the conch. If the tubes from Fredricks site were made from this thicker-lipped West Indian conch, it would explain the absence of a silca groove, which only occurs on the inner columella part of the shell. Although the evidence suggests that commercial manufacture of these articles by the Dutch was begun between 1776 and 1798 (Ewers 1957:42), it is possible that the tubes at the Fredricks site represent a somewhat earlier example of trade for this distant source of shell. If this is true, then tube beads, like the pendants, indicate a longer distance trade network historically than there is evidence for prehistorically at this locality.