The American Museum of Natural History's ongoing dig has focused on the island's mission of Santa Catalina de Guale, inhabited by Franciscan missionaries for much of the 17th century.

Excavating the church's cemetery has yielded most of the more than 70,000 beads found so far. Beaded items were placed in graves to accompany the dead in the early part of the mission's existence. Almost half the beads were found alongside a few individuals, some very young, buried near the church's altar.

"Saint Catherines was a frontier mission, but it also was a bread basket for the east-coast Spanish Empire," the museum's Lorann Pendleton said in a statement. "The missionaries at Saint Augustine [in what is now Florida] were always starving--you can read this in the letters written at the time--because that area was too humid and hot for corn to grow easily. Saint Catherines was able to trade corn for beads."