“…The overwhelming majority of glass bead studies from East Africa focus on the origin of beads, their proposed trade routes, and their chemical composition, rather than how they were adopted, adapted, modified, and used in the societies in which they ended up (except Pauly & Ferrandis, 2018;Rødland et al, 2020; also see Robertshaw, 2020). However, their temporal and geographic ubiquity suggests they were an important article of personal adornment, barter, and ritual and religious activity (e.g., Donley-Reid, 1990;Marshall, 2019).…”