The dead keep the living busy. At Montelirio, a Copper Age site near present-day Seville, Spain, archaeologists have calculated that 10 people would have had to work eight hours a day for seven months to produce the 270,000 beads found in graves dating back some 5,000 years. It would have been meticulous work, shaping these thin slices taken from a ton of scallops.

For Leonardo Garcia Sanjuán (University of Seville) and his colleagues, who presented these figures in a study published in Science Advances on January 29, this mound of beads is unparalleled anywhere in the world. It is true, they pointed out, that in Sungir, Russia, a man had been buried 34,000 years ago with 3,000 ivory beads. In Mal'ta, Siberia, 20,000 years ago, a child wore a necklace of 120 bone beads. In the Neolithic village of Ba'ja in Jordan (circa 7,000 BC), the remains of an 8-year-old child were adorned with over 2,500 beads. And 2,000 years ago, the Chumash of Santa Cruz Island, California, produced millions of beads used not as ornaments but as currency, as far away as Oregon and the southwestern plains of what was not yet America. In another Amerindian example, 30,000 beads were placed in a tomb at the Cahokia site (Illinois), in the Mississippi region, during the first millennium.

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