The Sullivans Island glass bead collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History contains over 56,000 beads which date from the late 18th to the late 19th century. Excavated in the 1930s from a site on the Columbia River in the Plateau region of North America, this collection contains examples of most known bead varieties for this time period. Many of the beads conform to varieties that have been attributed to Bohemia, Venice, and China – three of the principal bead-producing centers at the time. One hundred and twenty-four beads were subjected to Laser-Ablation Inductively-Couple Mass-Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) analysis at the Smithsonian’s Materials Conservation Institute to see if the chemical composition of the glass could be correlated with a place of origin. The results revealed several distinct compositional groups, some of which could be linked to geographical areas.