Nassarius in the context of "Gastropod"

Jewellery (or jewelry in American English) consists of decorative items worn for personal adornment such as brooches, rings, necklaces, earrings, pendants, bracelets, and cufflinks. Jewellery may be attached to the body or the clothes. From a Western perspective, the term is restricted to durable ornaments, excluding flowers for example. For many centuries, metals such as gold and silver, often combined with gemstones, has been the normal material for jewellery. Other materials such as glass, shells, or wood may also be used.

Jewellery is one of the oldest types of archaeological artefact – with 100,000-year-old beads made from Nassarius shells thought to be the oldest known jewellery. The basic forms of jewellery vary between cultures but are often extremely long-lived; in European cultures the most common forms of jewellery listed above have persisted since ancient times, while other forms such as adornments for the nose or ankle, important in other cultures, are much less common.

A bead is a small, decorative object that is formed in a variety of shapes and sizes of a material such as stone, bone, shell, glass, plastic, wood, or pearl and with a small hole for threading or stringing. Beads range in size from under 1 mm to over 1 cm in diameter.

Beads represent some of the earliest forms of jewellery, with a pair of beads made from Nassarius sea snail shells dating to approximately 100000 years ago thought to be the earliest known example.Beadwork is the art or craft of making things with beads. Beads can be woven together with specialized thread, strung onto thread or soft, flexible wire, or adhered to a surface (e.g. fabric, clay).