page_title: Powder glass beads
section_title: Krobo beads
hierarchical_section_title: Powder glass beads / Types of beads / Krobo beads
caption_attribution_description: Krobo bead (fused glass fragments).
context_page_description: Powder glass beads are a type of necklace ornamentation. The earliest such beads were discovered during archaeological excavations at Mapungubwe in South Africa, and dated to between 970-1000 CE. Manufacturing of the powder glass beads is now concentrated in West Africa, particularly in the Ghana area. The origins of beadmaking in Ghana are unknown, but the great majority of powder glass beads produced today is made by Ashanti and Krobo craftsmen and women. Krobo bead making has been documented to date from as early as the 1920s but despite limited archaeological evidence, it is believed that Ghanaian powder glass bead making dates further back. Bead making in Ghana was first documented by John Barbot in 1746. Beads still play important roles in Krobo society, be it in rituals of birth, coming of age, marriage, or death.
  Powder glass beads are made from finely ground glass, the main source being broken and unusable bottles and a great variety of other scrap glasses. Special glasses such as old cobalt medicine bottles, cold cream jars, and many other types of glasses from plates, ashtrays, window panes - to name only a few - are occasionally bought new, just for the purpose.
context_section_description: Krobo powder glass beads are made in vertical molds fashioned out of a special, locally dug clay. Most molds have a number of depressions, designed to hold one bead each, and each of these depressions, in turn, has a small central depression to hold the stem of a cassava leaf. The mold is filled with finely ground glass that can be built up in layers in order to form sequences and patterns of different shapes and colours. The technique could be described as being somewhat similar to creating a sand "painting" or to filling a bottle with different-coloured sands and is called the "vertical-mold dry powder glass technique". When cassava leaf stems are used, these will burn away during firing and leave the bead perforation. Certain powder glass bead variants, however, receive their perforations after firing, by piercing the still hot and pliable glass with a hand-made, pointed metal tool. Firing takes place in clay kilns until the glass fuses.
  There are three distinct styles of modern Krobo powder glass beads:  
  Fused glass fragment beads which are being made by fusing together fairly large bottle glass or glass bead fragments.  These beads are translucent or semi-translucent and receive their perforations, as well as their final shapes, after firing.  
  Beads composed of two halves (usually bicones, occasionally spheres) that are being created from pulverized glass. The two halves are being joined together in a second, short firing process.  
  The "Mue ne Angma" or "Writing Beads", conventional powder glass beads made from finely ground glass, with glass slurry decorations that are being "written" on and fused in a second firing.
caption: Krobo bead (fused glass fragments)
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