Glass Bead Trade and Colonization of the Western Hemisphere

During Pre-Columbian times, the Natives of North and South America made and used beads made of various stones, bones, and shells. Glass making was not known to them. The European explorers, beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese Conquistadors, and later the Dutch, French, and English introduced glass beads which were highly prized by the Native Americans. These glass trade beads were used by the Europeans (beginning with Columbus or perhaps even earlier with the Vikings) to purchase various commodities. To the Europeans, the beads were cheap in comparison to the value which the American products brought when imported to Europe. Beads were included in the purchase of the island of Manhattan by the Dutch. The Hudson’ Bay Company used glass beads to buy furs. The demand for beads to trade was important in the growth of the glass bead industry in Europe which was a mainly centered in Venice.

See great modern day lampwork glass beads at Beadshaper

You might also want to check out Rose's new Metal Jewelry Shaper web site.
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Early History of Pendants

Pendants were among the earliest forms of jewelry. A copper pendant believed to have been made in Sumeria, the first civilization, around 8700 B.C. has been found by archaeologists. In Babylonia around the 8th Century B.C. seals that were used to sign documents by imprinting in wet clay tablets were worn as pendants. The earliest pendants were made of stone, but later glass and gemstones were substituted. The Pharaohs in agent Egypt wore a type of pendant called a cartouche. The cartouche had a rectangular shape and had the name of the Pharaoh inscribed on it. It was supposed to protect him from evil. The ancient Greeks made gold pendants. The Greek necklace often featured multiple small vase-shaped pendants portraying figures of deities in Greek mythology. The ancient Romans also made gold pendants, but they more often consisted of one focal pendant. Sometimes a cabochon gem would be set in the gold pendant. Pendants were also worn in ancient India and ancient China.
You can find modern day pendants at Metal Jewelry Shaper.

Copper

Copper was the first metal mined at the dawn of civilization about 10,000 BC in Mesopotamia and Persia. It was first used for trinkets and tools, then for pots and pans. Bowls were made by hollowing out a block of wood, placing a sheet of copper on it, and hammering the copper to fit the shape of the mold. The ancient Egyptians found that copper was the best material for water pipes. Some copper pipes found in ancient Egyptian buildings remain intact today thousands of years later. The Egyptians also developed bronze (which is harder than copper) by alloying tin with copper. Much of the copper used in Egypt was mined in the Timna Valley in Israel and much of the Greek and Roman copper came from Cyprus. Copper later came into use in India and China. The Pre-Columbian civilizations of the Western Hemisphere developed copper mining independantly. European scientists discovered the ability of copper to conduct electricity much later in the 17th and 18th Centuries. That discovery was necessary for the scientific advances that made the world what it is today.
You can find a number of exciting hand crafted copper bracelets for sale at Metal Jewelry Shaper

Botanical Art

Prehistoric art often depicted animals, but drawings of plants were not common. Later, plant art appeared in the art of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. This interest in plant art might have been associated with the beginning of agriculture. The ancient Greeks and Romans decorated coins and ceramics with pictures of flowers and other plants.
Rose hand crafted the lampwork glass blue flower pictured above on the left for the Beadshaper collection.
Rose handcrafted the silver pendant on the right for the Metal Jewelry collection. The agate stone mounted on the pendant naturally formed a flower-like arrangement of petals.
Rose will be teaching classes in various exciting aspects of jewelry making at the Bead and Boutique Arts Show, February 28 to March 2 at the Concord Hilton Hotel in Concord, California. See Classes List for details.
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Agate

Agate is a stone containing layers of quartz. The layering of quartz often occurs in crevices of volcanic rock. Various agates are of various colors and forms, and are found all over the world. Theophrastus, an ancient Greek naturalist, is credited with first describing agate about 5 thousand years ago.
Agate was discovered near the Nahe River in the towns of Idar and Oberstein about 6 hundred years ago or earlier which resulted in the towns becoming important gem cutting centers. Later when all the agate in the area had been mined, the gem cutters imported agate from elsewhere, particularly Brazil, and continued being a gem cutting center.
The silver pendant pictured above features an agate stone and can be found at Metal Jewelry Shaper.
Rose (the Metal Jewelry Shaper) will be teaching classes in various metal jewelry making techniques at the Bead and boutique Arts show at the Concord Hilton hotel in Concord, California February 28 through March 2, 2014. See Metal Jewelry Classes for details.

Sterling Silver

 

Silver is a metal that is precious and beautiful but soft. Therefore silver is usually alloyed with copper to give it hardness. However too much copper means less silver and therefore less valuable. So in the Middle Ages in Europe the sterling silver standard was set for the maximum per cent of copper (or any metal other than silver) that could be alloyed into a silver piece and still allowing the silver to meet the standard. The standard was and has continued to be at least 92.5% silver. The word sterling is believed to come from an old word for star. Sterling silver has been used in coins, jewelry, and eating utensils (hence the term silver ware). Silver forks and spoons could only be afforded by the most wealthy people. Today sterling silver is often used in jewelry, but as for eating utensils it is mostly found in antiques. 

The upper plates in the hand crafted earrings pictured above are made of sterling silver. They can be found on the Metal Jewelry Shaper web site.

Incidentally Rose (the Metal Jewelry Shaper) will be teaching classes in various metal jewelry making techniques at the Bead and boutique Arts show at the Concord Hilton hotel in Concord, California February 28 through March 2, 2014. See Metal Jewelry Classes for details.

 

Iberia

The name Iberia refers to the peninsula in the southwest corner of Europe which is separated from the rest of Europe by the Pyrenees mountains.  Neandarthal people began living there 200,000 years ago and became extinct about 30,000 years ago. Humans who physically looked like the humans of today migrated into the peninsula about 40,000 years ago. The earliest civilizations with various cultures and trade with other areas of Europe and the Mediterranean began to develop around 5,000 years ago. Around 3,000 years ago, various seafaring cultures developed colonies for trade on the Mediterranean coast of Iberia, first the Phoenicians, then the Greeks and the Carthaginians. The name Iberia came from the Greeks. The Romans invaded Iberia in 218 and took it away from Carthage, making it part of the Roman Empire. With the decline of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Middle Ages, Iberia was conquered by Germanic tribes beginning in the 5^th Century AD. The Moslems conquered Iberia in the 8^th Century and stayed about 700 years. The Christians remained in the northernmost part of the peninsula and gradually reconquered it by 1492 when all Moslems and Jews were expelled unless they converted to Christianity. Ultimately most of Iberia became consolidated as the Kingdom of Spain, but Portugal on the western coast remained independent. Spain and Portugal sent fleets of ships to establish colonies in much of the western hemisphere as well as colonies in Africa and the Far East, most of which have since then become independent.

The pendant pictured above was hand made by Rose Klapman and can be found on her web site at Metal Jewelry Shaper