North American Trade Bead Bibliographies

In 1972, Karlis Karklins and Roderick Sprague published “Glass Trade Beads in North America: An Annotated Bibliography” in Volume 6 of Historical Archaeology to aid archaeologists in analyzing, dating, and interpreting glass beads recovered from North American sites. In 1980, under the South Fork Press (Moscow, Idaho) imprint, they published an expanded and updated version bringing the total number of references to 455. In 1987, they released the First Supplement to the bibliography which added an additional 588 reports to the list. While many of the references listed in the bibliographies are still relevant to researchers, many are not readily available from libraries or Internet sources. Fortunately, the compilers photocopied most of them and their scans are available here. The references are numbered in the sequence in which they appear in the bibliographies.

Trade bead references published after 1987 are listed in the North America section of the Researching the World’s Beads Bibliography, also available on this website.

Thanks are extended to the Bead Society of Greater Washington for providing funds to purchase a scanner to replace the one practically burned out during the scanning of the articles in the 1980 bibliography. The new device greatly facilitated the scanning of the supplement articles. Our thanks also to Terry O’Neill, Floor Kaspers, and Margot Thompson who together helped check the over 500 links in the First Supplement section.

These bibliographies are PDFs. If you do not have the Adobe Reader on your computer, you may download the Adobe PDF Reader.