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In the American Southwest, prehistoric artisans manufactured large quantities of high-quality disc beads. The sophisticated disc bead industry that developed between 300 BC and AD 1450 compelled early archaeologists to question the labor costs required to produce the over 1,000,000 disc beads documented in the southwestern archaeological record. This paper attempts to reevaluate prevalent hypotheses surrounding prehistoric disc bead technology and develop an updated method of estimating bead drilling labor cost. I produce mathematical formulas expressing the relationship between bead material and thickness and required drilling time. The formulas provide archaeologists with two raw-material-specific equations to estimate time requirements for bead production based on bead thickness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]