Small, brick-red Indo-Pacific beads mostly 4-5mm in excellent condition
22-inch strands collected in 1990 in Indonesia
The Indo-Pacific family of beads originated in Arikamedu in Southern India around 400 BC and quickly spread in all directions. Over the next few hundred years, they spread all over Southeast-Asia, throughout the Middle East and North Africa and all the way to Scandinavia in Europe, becoming the "greatest little trade bead of all time" according to bead researcher Pete Francis.
They come in other colors, often aqua and blue, and these days are mostly coming to the US from the Sahara under a bevy of inaccurate names and burdened with fictitious stories that are far less interesting than the truth.
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