ABSTRACT
Anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century was a holistic discipline comprised of four interrelated fields archaeology, ethnology, biological anthropology and linguistics. The process of artifact classification and the creation of a typology a tool brought to people discipline by a school of archaeological thought known as culture history. James Ford argued that types were a tool or 'device which is used to examine the most minute fragments of culture a student can grasp. While not as elegant or tidy as James Deetz's gravestone study, the tools of stylistic and frequency seriation have a role to play in the interpretation of Mardi Gras materials. If people think about the trends they saw in the stylistic seriation, it seems that Bacchus's shift from opaque to transparent beads coincides with the replacement of opaque beads with transparent ones in popularity. Participation in Carnival celebrations gave the author an insider's perspective to what attributes were valued by bead catchers.
