Eighteenth-Century Glass Beads from the English Slaving Fort at Bunce Island, Sierra Leone

While countless tons of European glass beads flowed into West Africa over the centuries, there is still relatively little information concerning what specific nations were importing over time. It was therefore of great interest to learn about two collections of beads surface collected at the site of a British slaving fort that operated on Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone estuary of coastal Sierra Leone from the late 17th to the early 19th century. Although it is impossible to assign the beads to a specific period in the fort\u27s history, it is clear that they are of 18th-century origin and were part of the goods traded by the British. The present study describes the small but diverse collection of beads and places them in historical context