Mark Kenoyer can learn a lot from a stone bead.
He can, for instance, determine what sorts of tools and technology were used to create it. He can deduce the trade routes by which the materials were imported and exported. He can construct theories about the environment where the beads were constructed and collected and about the people who lived there.
Kenoyer has spent his career using beads—and other recovered artifacts-to construct the details of the Indus Valley Civilization, one of the oldest in the world, and offer insights about daily life in Harappa, an ancient village site in Pakistan that dates to more than 3800 B.C.
“Beads are an object that was considered a small find,” chuckles Kenoyer, the George F. Dales Jr. and Barbara A. Dales professor of anthropology and one of the world’s foremost experts on the Indus Valley. “Oh, yeah, we found some beads. Beads I’m analyzing now are made of materials that have been traded to Mesopotamia. There’s a person wearing a necklace made of these beads buried in Israel who has been identified by one of my previous students, Geoffrey Ludvik. These beads came from the Indus Valley, were traded up the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and then on to the Levant. They were also traded into Central Asia, Iran and Mycenae. It’s a treasure of information about the city.”
Soft steatite beads made by the Indus craftspeople were manufactured in very specific ways, using thinner cuts made by a bronze saw with distinctive serrations. They were drilled with tiny copper drills and then ground to become micro beads, thousands of which were required to make a single ornament.
“I argue that they were demonstrating power through their ability to control labor and also to make the smallest beads in the world,” says Kenoyer. “Nobody else in the world was making beads like this.”
Kenoyer’s own story began in India, where he was born to American missionaries. As a teenager in India he met with archaeologists in Delhi who advised him to study in America and get his training there. His father wanted him to study Biblical Archaeology, so he went to Wheaton College, but then transferred to the University of California Berkeley to study with George F. Dales, who was working in Pakistan.
Kenoyer began work in India and Pakistan in the mid-1970s. Thanks to his skill in learning native languages, Kenoyer is one of the few archaeologists who’s been able to spend his career working in both Pakistan and India, a benefit that has given him access to information and helped create connections other scholars can’t obtain.
“Since I had Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, it was easy for me to work in South Asia,” says Kenoyer, who learned Sanskrit in Berkeley and Pushto here at the UW. “Most foreigners have a hard time working in a country where they don’t speak the language.”
In the late 1980s, Kenoyer and Dales began a major long-term research project at Harappa, one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley Civilization.
“Nobody wanted to dig there because all the buildings had been robbed by brick robbers,” Kenoyer recalls. “We managed to excavate the site for almost 30 years. That’s a strategy you have to use to understand how a city grows.”
And what happens inside it. Kenoyer’s team collected soil samples from what was a bead workshop—samples that ended up indicating the precise location of a floor mat on which bead makers were sitting to chip the carnelian bead roughouts.
“It shows where people were sitting and working,” he says. “It’s an amazing recovery. This is the exact spot where they sat to work. It helps us understand their spatial organization. These beads were made in a domestic context, in their homes. It wasn’t a big factory.”
Kenoyer stopped digging at Harappa in 2001 and has spent much of the intervening years analyzing the pottery, beads and bone samples his team collected. It’s a massive amount of data.
“We’re trying to understand what kind of debris was coming into the valley over the 700 years of this history,” he says. “That takes a lot of time.”
Earlier this year, Kenoyer received the 2019 Award for Excellence in Archaeological Analysis from the Society for American Archaeology, for his “detailed and rigorous empirical analyses of a broad range of archaeological materials, guided by an innovative interpretive framework grounded in experimental and ethnoarchaeological approaches.”
One of those experimental approaches involves the use of a nuclear reactor housed at UW’s College of Engineering to analyze the microsamples Kenoyer’s team collected at Harappa to determine their origins. This work was undertaken by another of his previous students, Randall Law, as part of his dissertation research.
“UW is at the forefront of developing technologies on how to analyze samples,” Kenoyer explains.
During the summer, Kenoyer teaches a popular class called Ancient Technology Invention. On a ridge above Picnic Point, his students, a mix of undergraduates, graduate students and art students make stone tools, pottery and build an updraft kiln, among other things. He’s been teaching the class since 1988.
“Many students have no clue about ancient technology—how do you make a pot? What does a workshop look like? How do you make a stone tool? How do you make dyes?” Kenoyer says. “The goal is to help them learn how to observe and see what residues would be found archaeologically.”
Recently, in the lab of a Harvard University colleague, Kenoyer discovered a box of deep core samples from Mohenjo-Daro, another significant archaeological site in Pakistan, collected by George Dales back in 1964-65 —the same site Kenoyer couldn’t wait to study as a young man.
“I looked over and saw the box of pottery coring labeled 1964-65, and I just about fainted. This is the most important record of something that happened that my mentor never finished doing,” says Kenoyer. “Way down there is an entire village of the original people who settled the site. With these cores, I will be able to prove these lower levels of Mohenjo-Daro exist, which will totally change the way we see the site itself. This is going to be a really important discovery.”