Powder glass beads

The earliest such beads were discovered during archaeological excavations at Mapungubwe in South Africa, and dated to between 970-1000 CE.

The origins of beadmaking in Ghana are unknown, but the great majority of powder glass beads produced today is made by Ashanti and Krobo craftsmen and women.

[1] Beads still play important roles in Krobo society, be it in rituals of birth, coming of age, marriage, or death.

Pulverized or merely fragmented, and made into beads, these glasses yield particularly bright colours and shiny surfaces.

Krobo powder glass beads are made in vertical molds fashioned out of a special, locally dug clay.

The mold is filled with finely ground glass that can be built up in layers in order to form sequences and patterns of different shapes and colours.

The most prevalent decorations, preformed from strips of hot glass, were applied in patterns of criss-crossed loops, longitudinal stripes and circles.

Longitudinal seams that can often be observed on these beads give evidence that they were made in horizontal molds.

Meteyi beads are often ellipsoid in cross section and they have a rough surface on the side which touched the bottom of the mold during firing.

So-called Ateyun beads were made in different shapes but always in red, to imitate real Mediterranean coral.

Glass, which is finely crushed to a powder, is mixed with a binder such as saliva or gum arabic diluted in water.