Venetian glass beads- the oldest European artifacts found in North America

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More than five centuries ago, a handful of blueberry-sized blue beads made an astonishing journey.

Crafted by glassmakers in Venice, the small spheres were carried east along Silk Road trade networks before being ferried north, into the hinterlands of Eurasia and across the Bering Strait, where they were deposited in the icy ground of northern Alaska.

A new study published in the journal American Antiquity asserts that the glass objects are among the oldest European-made items ever discovered in North America.

As the authors note in the paper, “trade beads” such as these have been found in North America before, including in the eastern Great Lakes region and the Caribbean. But those beads dated to between 1550 and 1750, according to Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky.

“This is the first documented instance of the presence of indubitable European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the Eurasian continent,” add the authors.

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