More than 270,000 handmade beads have been found in a 5,000-year-old burial site in Spain. Archaeologists believe that the women buried there may have been influential and high-ranking individuals.
The find is likely the largest cluster of beads ever found at a single burial site, researchers report in a recent research paper published in the journal Science Advances.
Archaeologists discovered the beads during excavations of the Tolos de Montelirio burial site in southwestern Spain, near the tomb of the famous "Ivory Lady." The tomb, located near Seville, was used from about 2800 to 2600 B.C. during the Copper Age.
Here, archaeologists discovered 20 skeletons and confirmed that at least 15 of them belonged to women. This gender imbalance is unusual in itself, and the beads may indicate that these women were particularly powerful.
The women were buried with about 270769 disc-shaped beads made from sea shells, animal bones and stone, all together weighing about 15 kilograms.
Previously, the largest known bead collections contained only about 30,000 pieces. According to study co-author Leonardo Garcia Sanjuan, a historian at the University of Seville (Spain), Miguel Angel Criado of the social and political newspaper El Pais, most tombs contain between 1,000 and 5,000 beads.
Making the tiny beads would have required a lot of time and manpower: the researchers estimate that the amount of work is equivalent to ten people working eight hours a day for almost seven months. And that's not counting the time it took to collect the materials used to make them.
The researchers arrived at these rough estimates by trying to make the beads themselves, using only the tools that were available at the time. On average, it took them 55 minutes to make each bead.
But because the Copper Age people who made the funerary beads were likely skilled artisans, researchers estimate that each bead took about 11 minutes to make.
"The effort involved in making these pieces of jewelry far exceeds that required to create red-carpet couture clothing today," said study co-author Marta Diaz-Guardamino, an archaeologist at Durham University in England.
The analysis also showed that many of the beads were made from scallop shells. The researchers estimate that more than 770 kilograms of scallop shells were used to make the beads. Because the shells may have been shimmering, the beads probably had a sparkling, glittering sheen in the sun.
"In the pre-Christian world, the scallop, its shell, was a symbol of femininity," Garcia Sanjuan says. "It's a symbol of goddesses, mostly fertility goddesses."
The beads probably once adorned ceremonial gowns or robes made of linen (researchers found microscopic pieces of linen at the find site). The dresses were also decorated with pendants
of ivory and
antar in the shape of
birds and acorns.
"These women were probably religious and possibly political leaders in their time, running a famous sanctuary around which important public gatherings were organized," said study co-author Samuel Ramirez-Cruzado, a geoarchaeologist at the University of Seville.
The researchers do not know if the women were related to each other because they did not analyze the DNA of the remains. This could be a reason for future research. In the future, archaeologists also want to study the broader social structure of the group that lived at the site. They are interested in finding out if this community was a matriarchy.
"Matriarchy is a very controversial concept in history and anthropology, but now I really want to deal with it closely," Garcia Sanjuan said. "I think it's just not a coincidence that we see these cases repeatedly ... between 2900 and 2600 B.C. of all these great, very, very high-ranking, powerful women."