63 * 10,5 mm
 

Displayed above is a wonderful ancient Burmese bead who has been found in the sandy earth in Matehtilay, Maline in Burma. Most of Burma has acidic ground. Lower Burma has some small areas with alkaline earth. However, the middle part of Burma, like Matehtilay has a big area where the sandy soil has a neutral PH-value. In this case, the only give away of the true age of the bead is its soft sheen/patina and craftsmanship.
 
PH- map of Myanmar
 

Often these excavated beads have never or only briefly been worn.  Often they were placed in burial caskets in graves signifying the social position of the deceased and/or acted as a talisman or even currency in the afterlife. They could also be placed in the center of Buddhist stupas as relics meant to sanctify and purify the construction.
  

Cracks made by a thousand cold winters
If an agate bead has been 'lucky' to 'sleep' for hundreds of years in areas where the temperature goes below zero during winter the moisture in the bead will make small circular cracks in the surface of the bead. This is due to the expansion of the water molecules when they turn into ice. This beautiful sign of age is only to be seen in beads from the Himalayas and Afghanistan and other places with frost in the winter. Beads that have dwelled in areas with hotter climates will not display these marks of age. The appearance of these cracks will also depend on the hardness and 'porousness' of the stone. A dense agate stone bead with less water inside will even survive the winters of the Himalayas without these cracks.
 

On the surface of the above bead you will note many small artificially made indentations designed to imitate ancient frost patina. But the cracks are not circular. This bead is a true fake! Also, note the bead's dusty sheen. Due to their astronomical value, Dzi beads are the most commonly faked beads.  
 
THE SWEAT FROM HUMAN SKIN
Old beads develop a patina, not only from the meeting with mother earth. Another important type of patina is a result human sweat causing a chemical reaction with the surface of the stone bead. The polishing of a bead is not finished the moment it leaves the tumbler or the polishing stone of its maker. Then the human skin takes over the job. The human body hands over the bead from generation to generation like a relay running in slow motion. In this way the final look becomes a never ending process facilitated by the human skin acting as a soft abrasive. Beads have most probably in all ancient cultures since the Neolithic period been a focal point of magic power. In the times, well before religion got organized, every clan had a shaman.
 
Shamanic sweat & rechargeable talismans
The shaman served as a facilitating and negotiating link between the mostly invisible spirit world and the mundane world of ordinary people. The wearing of beads was in this context a religious protective act against predatory spirits in an animistic constructed world full of spirit entities living in caves, mountains, waterfalls, and trees. Later the shaman was transformed or substituted into a holy man or a priest. In all the traditions where beads have magic powers, the bead has to be worn directly in contact with the skin and preferably close to the human heart. Therefore we see a lot of ancient beads with a surface colored by the contact of human skin. Of course, not only shamans or holy men but also people from lower strata's of society wore beads. However, the commonly used term for mines or beads in India, Babagoria or Baba Ghori, which means holy man's bead, indicates that beads in ancient India primarily was used by religious leaders. An ancient scripture from the Gupta period, Vijjalagga, states that the value of a bead is enhanced by wearing. (Indian Beads, Shantaram B. Deo p.15) The notion that a bead has gained more 'holy capital,' if it has been worn by a Sufi, Buddhist or Hindu saint, as compared to excavation beads, is strong among collectors even today.
 
These statements gives in a symbolic thinking brain only meaning if the wearer of the bead has good karma, which starts a karmic ping pong effect between the wearer and the bead: The holy man vibrates with good energy which is absorbed by the bead - the bead then vibrates with spiritual energy which then in return is absorbed by the wearer. It is in this context I have coined the wording: Rechargeable Talisman.
 

That makes beads, not only the oldest art form, but also the oldest continuously used and almost non-changing art form in human history. What I mean to say is: Neolithic people from 8000 years ago were wearing the stone bead below I am wearing now in this moment. Is that is not inspiring awe, nothing will.

Now to the contrast. It can be difficult to display in a photo on a website, but the shine on the Luk Mik bead shown below is new. I guess you can observe the difference.
 

Beads are designed in almost every shape within the limits of the available technology and the raw material. In one end of the spectrum we can find beads that just are picked up stones that have been tumbled and holed:
 

 
21 * 19 * 13 * 6 mm
 

11 * 10 * 3 mm
 

17 * 14 * 4 mm
 

 

28 * 19 mm
 

24 * 10 mm
 

83 * 12 * 8 mm
 

THE GRINDING & POLISHING PROCESS
The artisans who polished the stone beads were different from the ones that were digging the agate out from the mines and from the ones that were chipping and rough shaping the beads.
 

The uneven surface of the Indus Valley bead displayed above shows a polishing technique with very rough abrasives.
 
Tumbling - bag polishing of beads 800 A.D.
Around 800 AD the smart Indians invented a new way of polishing beads. Before that time every bead was shaped through hand rubbing or by the unknown Persian technique. Now the bead makers started to polish the beads in several numbers by putting them into a goatskin bag with water and agate or jasper dust. Two men then rolled the bag between them on the floor for several days. 
 

Together with the invention of the diamond drill in the second century BC bag polishing was paving the way for mass production of beads. But mass production always comes with a price to pay.
 

The same is the case with Zoomorphic, human and other distinctive designed beads; they would lose their shape in a tumbler.
 

THE HEATING PROCESS
I have to laud the mysterious Indus Valley people. They invented a method of heat treatment to enhance the color of the agate. Still today these ancient techniques are performed in Cambat in Gujarat. After the initial drying and heating processes as described in the chapter, Mining, and collecting of raw material, further heating processes will be done to alter the colors in the stone. This takes place after the bead has been formed into a roughout and even after the drilling of the hole. Beads are here sorted out according to design, color, and potential color and then put into different clay pots and placed in small rectangular low walled brick enclosures. Then ashes and cow or goat dung is placed all around the pots and the whole thing is turned on fire at the same time to avoid thermal shock. The agate is then very slowly heated to a temperature around 340 degrees Celsius. Again the cooling down has to be done slowly to prevent undesired cracks in the stones. Improper heating will invariably result in cracked beads. Even during a perfect heating process a lot of unwanted cracks will occur. The whole process is therefore monitored by a highly skilled supervisor, who has learned his craft from his father in an unbroken generation-chain right down to ancient times. No wonder you have to write your father's name in a visa application for India.
 
Cooked or uncooked agate beads
However, not all agate will be heat treated. After being dug out the agate is divided into two types, those which should and those which should not be heat treated for color enhancement. If the agate displayed a beautiful and translucent shine in itself, it was not heat treated. Such a bead you can see below. These agate beads are often referred to as 'uncooked'.
 

The reason for the Indian Ratanpur agates ability to transform into carnelian is the high content of iron oxide in the stone. The rusty color of the iron oxide makes the gray agate reddish through heating.
 
The heat from the fire transforms the agate into a beautiful brownish or reddish orange stone with often fascinating surface patterns.
 

If the opening of the hole is perfectly round, it usually indicates the help of some kind of machinery, like a bow drill for example. Normally. A big hole denotes a very old bead. In ancient days, arcane drilling technology made it difficult to make small holes and the bead strings, made out of natural materials, were made thicker so that they would not break easily.
 

25 * 7 mm

As you can see on the above photo a thin iron rod is placed on a stick of wood or bamboo. On the end of the iron rod a small diamond is placed. The fitting of the diamond is an art in itself. With this technology it became possible to drill very small holes.

A bead maker from Cambey in
the process of drilling holes

TECHNOLOGY AND BEADS
Every time a new machine technology makes it easier to mass produce beads, they begin a journey down the strata's of society. If a certain type of bead gets easy to produce it automatically looses its charm as a talisman for the upper segments of society as it gains momentum as a desirable object for the masses. Only the sublime, the at a given time rare beads will continue their enchantment of the upper classes. In this way, the historical development of new bead producing technologies finally killed the agate bead as a leading object of desire. First of all other materials such as precious stones took the lead and left agate and similar more available stones types such as jasper in the dark.
 
However, the new machine and other mass producing technologies did not defeat the semiprecious stone beads in a linear process. Here is an example: In the end of the Indus Valley era the hunt for exotic stone bead material counteracted the mass producing trend. As beads became increasingly easier to produce the stone material itself became more and more important. This tendency is clearly demonstrated on this page displaying my late Indus Valley beads.  The artisans also reacted to the challenge of machine technology with their desire to create the sublime to invent more and more sophisticated ways to create beads in odd forms or in forms difficult to make such as for example very long and slender beads. More and more sophisticated ways of etching and artificially coloring of the beads also became an artistic drive that peaked in the creation and development of the marvelous dZi beads.
 
Today stone beads have again come into the limelight of the sublime. The new entry pass is age. If a bead is ancient it is automatically again restored to its former glory.
 
Unfortunately, there are many beads out there with false entry passes.