An interesting item I stumbled on regarding Viking Age beads is the dissertation "Perler fra vikingtiden (Beads of the Viking Age)" by Megan Hickey.  This work specifically covers beads from Viking Age Britain.  You can download it for free here.

I highly recommend taking a look at this work as it discusses bead finds in context (grave vs production sites), and also details where they were found in situ in the case of graves.  Charts detail the number of finds along with things like color and decoration.  To give a snapshot of some of the data in the piece, it notes that 76.1% of beads from non-production sites were glass (10.4% were amber and all other types were significantly less).  59% of beads at non-production sites were undecorated, 22% decorated and 19% of the finds are unknown.  The percentage of undecorated vs. decorated is even higher at production sites.

Regarding color, blue undecorated beads are the most common, followed by yellow and green. It is interesting to note that all of the gold/silver foil type beads were found at one site, Kneep (which I discussed last week here ). 

The report also has a number of interesting tables, including one that breaks down graves by age and gender.  There are also discussions of some of the issues with excavations and also other uses of beads beyond necklaces.  There is even a comparison to trends in Scandinavia.

I was hoping to track down some of the finds that had a number of beads in conjunction with oval brooches, but, unfortunately, many of them were excavated well over 100 years ago.  I am still hoping to find some of these items located in museums, but I fret that I might just be stuck with some pretty terrible descriptions such as the one below from the 1800s.  (Are you kidding me???)

But, one of the things that the dissertation did for me was lead me to research several interesting graves.  The paper had no illustrations, though it had brief descriptions of the finds, so I decided to see what images I could track down some of them online (or in books at home). 

From a double burial (excavated in 1878) there were beads, as well as oval brooches, at Ballinaby.  One source notes that there were 12 beads, though the original documents only show drawings of a few. Also interesting in this grave is a flat chain of 4 strand silver wire.

Another mentioned in the dissertation is the Pagan Lady of Peel, a grave from the first half of the 10th Century.  This necklace had 71 beads, but was not worn in conjunction with oval brooches.  I plan to take a more in depth look at this particular grave soon, but for now, here is an image of the jewelry.

Saffron Waldon, Essex, has a fascinating necklace.  This is a mid-to-late 10th century item, that is discussed in a bit more detail in Jane Kershaw's book Viking Identities: Scandinavian Jewelry in England.  Kershaw mentions that the center pendant seen below is likely to be an Anglo Saxon item, while the others had Scandinavian origins.  The grave was excavated in 1877.  There were no oval brooches found in this grave but scholars in the mid-1960s believe that this represented a pagan burial of a Scandinavian immigrant. 

​I am still trying to track down an image of Pierowall, Grave 4, though I am not sure that one exists at this time.  The description of the grave from the Journal of the British Archaeological Association (1846) is as follows:​

I plan to talk more about the graves, and additional beads from this site later this week.  Grave 2 has been labeled a female grave, and 3 is considered male, but both have beads.  2 is particularly interesting as it not only contains no oval brooches but does have evidence of a belt.  (Grave one did have oval brooches as well as a solitary bead.)

Resources

​Anderson, Joseph.  "Notes on the contents of two Viking Graves in Islay", Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Volume 14, 1878 (https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-352-1/dissemination/pdf/vol_014/14_051_094.pdf )

Crofton Crocker, T. "Antiquities discovered in Orkney and Ireland, compared", Journal of the British Archaeological Association, Volume 2, 1846.

Hickey, Megan.  "Perler fra vikingtiden (Beads of the Viking Age)", 2014. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/8571/
​
Kershaw, Jane. Viking Identities: Scandinavian Jewelry in England, Oxford University Press, 2013. (​https://amzn.to/2FRNteC)

Parsons, Adam, et. al.  Shadows in the Sand: Excavation of a Viking-Age Cemetery at Cumwhitton, Oxford Archaeology, 2014. 

​Location: Scotland - Kneep, Uig, Isle of Lewis
Date: 900-1000AD
Type of Find: Burial
Date of Excavation: 1979
Context: Beads were found in neck area, oval brooches (P51) were present
Beads: 44 glass beads (39 segmented, five unsegmented), yellow, blue, silver, gold.  Length varies between 9 - 13 mm.

​This excavation was begun by civil authorities (not archaeologists) as a bone was protruding from the sand in a public area.  There was, however, a great bit of detail involved, and between the information presented and later interviews, there was enough to logically reconstruct the burial.
 
One of the things that fascinates me with this particular find is that all of the beads are of the same type.  They have one to four segments, and have a simple color palette.  We do not know the original arrangement, unfortunately, but know that these items at least were worn together.  One other interesting item is that this paper notes that the beads were produced in long lengths and beads were snapped off as needed along the segmentations.  Based on the text, the metal glass beads are of two types, with one just having a metal coating on the glass and the other having a layer of clear glass encasing the metal.  The description of the process in this paper is a clunky, to say the least, but might be due to the lack of glass workers as part of the process (there is more in the way of experimental archaeology in that field now).
 
Personally, I have to wonder if it is truly gold encased the beads or if the glass merely had a reaction when laid over the silver that alters the color to gold (or perhaps it was amber colored glass laid over silver).  Even glass that has silver added to it (something done with spectacular modern color-shifting glasses), can produce fuming that will alter the color of adjacent glasses. 
 
In his blog entry, “Kaupang before the Coin”, Matthew Delvaux discusses the idea that the segmented beads were imported goods from the Middle East and proposes the idea that they possibly were a form of currency in the early Viking Age.
 

​As an aside, I need to note that I will probably be talking a great deal here about segmented beads as this particular item is found all over the Viking world.
 
This necklace is very simple, and when all strung together the necklace is 465mm long.  That length would make for a long swag between brooches, and the authors of the paper suggest possibly it was multiple strands.  It is also long enough to serve as a standard necklace as well. 
 
While reading about the Kneep necklace, I remembered a similar strand of beads from Birka and had to go back to look at that material to assuage my curiosity.  In Birka I, there is an image of a strand primarily comprised of segmented beads.  The caption for the photo has it listed as Grave 958.  However (and here goes some of my issues with the Birka material that I previously have mentioned), the descriptive text for that volume shows 958 as a male grave with a purse.  Grave 959 from that book seems to better fit the image attributed in the plates as 958.  
​

​The text describes the beads as being one carnelian, 5 dark blue made of glass (one triple segment, 4 double segment), 4 green glass beads (one 4 segments, one triple), 7 yellow glass beads (one triple segment, five double segment, one single).  These beads were found in conjunction with a pair of oval brooches (and the woman was decapitated, making for a rather gruesome interment).

My take on these finds is that sometimes smaller, and simpler, can be perfectly appropriate for a period impression.  Hopefully I can experiment further with crafting segmented beads myself!

Resources:
 
Arbman, Holger.  Birka I: Die Gräber, Tafeln, 1940.
 
Arbman, Holger.  Birka I: Die Gräber, Text, 1940.
 
Delvaux, Matthew.  “Kaupang before the Coin”, Text and Trowel, 2017.  https://textandtrowel.wordpress.com/2017/05/11/kaupang-before-the-coin/
 
Welander, R. D. E., et. al.  “A Viking Burial from Kneep, Uig, Isle of Lewis”, Proceedings of the Scoiety of Antiquaries of Scotland, Volume 117, 1987.
https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-352-1/dissemination/pdf/vol_117/117_149_174.pdf
 
National Museum of Scotland: https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/collection-search-results/?item_id=369355
 
Unimus.no Fotoportal: http://www.unimus.no/foto/imageviewer.html#/?id=12462897&type=jpeg

​As you have seen, I am learning to work glass and make glass beads.  I am still relatively new, and have a great deal of work ahead of me to advance this skill and I will be sharing some of my continued experiments on this blog under the heading of Glass Experiments.
 
I also am starting another category for my posts titled Viking Bead Research.  I am reading anything I can find on period bead production, but even of more interest to me is the context of the bead finds that we do have.  Anyone who has looked at Viking Age costume research for any amount of time comes to understand some of the flaws inherent in this particular field of science.  The foremost of which is that textiles quite often rarely survive in the grave, and what does is frequently fragmented.  Further, many of the graves that we reference were excavated during a time when textiles were not of interest to the archaeologists.  Typically they were not well treated, or merely scraped off the far more interesting (to them) metal weapons or jewelry.  Other practices were not as scientific as they are today, which can result in mislabeling of items from graves (meaning that at this point in time we are not be completely sure what items really do belong to what graves in some cases, and this can particularly come into play with older excavation sites like Birka).
 
In many cases, even solid, decorative items such as beads, were not as well regarded as impressive weapon burials.  This is a case made very clear by archaeologist Matthew Delvaux  In his blog “Text and Trowel”.  After describing how a cemetery in Bornholm, Denmark was excavated at a pace of 156 graves in 13 days, he then states “Beads in particular suffered from Vedel’s treatment. He recorded colors and numbers for each grave but then threw all the beads that he thought were worth keeping into containers for shipment to the National Museum of Denmark. The curators in Copenhagen resorted the monochrome beads into strings for each grave—although it’s unlikely that many of these beads actually came from the graves that they’re now associated with—and then they strung  all the mixed polychrome and mosaic beads onto strings of their own .”
 
Quite simply, this means that the beads we see hanging in some museums, or that are attributed to some graves, were not likely worn like that during the Viking Age.  They might not clearly represent something one individual owned.  And this also makes me wonder how many cases are there where the large, impressive beads make the displays, while the smaller items were lost to inept scientific practices, causing us to think that it was most common to have a string of large, multicolored beads?
 
Another thing that we often see out of context in reenactment are strings of beads from hoards.  Were these items really all strung together, and worn by one person, in life?  Or are those beads an accumulation of wealth just like the varied bits of silver in the same cache.  Do these collection of beads in a hoard relate in any way to beads in graves from the nearest settlement?

My plan is to poke through a variety of finds and look at the beads in context of not only the practices of the period, but also comparing that to more recent finds, finds from settlements and workshops (which might have different types of beads than those we sometimes see on display), and to look at the beads in context.  Are they from a settlement, hoard or grave? Where were they in the grave (at the neck, laying loose in the grave, contained in a pouch)? Were they found in conjunction with other items of dress such as oval brooches?  What do the more recent finds (with better scientific practices) show us?
 
I hope to share some of my finds, as well as my thoughts, as I wind my way along this trail.  Hopefully others will find it as interesting as I do!

2018 was pretty much a crappy year.  I was ready for it to be totally over by the time March rolled around, and it only got worse from there.  Family health issues were surreal (to put it mildly), and the punches just kept on coming.  And then there are the cat issues (one diagnosed with stage 3 kidney disease, another with lymphoma and a third had knee surgery.  Add to all of that the incessant rain, and things just were a jumbled mess.

One of the few good things was getting Malik, our new F1 Savannah boy.  He is exceptionally social and is my constant shadow when I am home.  A new travel trailer also meant a few short trips to test things out (and to take the Savannah's camping).  That bit, at least, was good.

I put together a new class for Pennsic that covers a more basic approach to a Viking Age Norse woman's wardrobe than my Textiles and Dress class covers.  It seemed to go over well and I plan to teach it again.  That class also ended up leaving me with a ton of questions regarding our perception of Viking Age beads (and specifically brooch swag and necklaces) and down the research rabbit hole I went.

I also got back to the garage and got my glass studio cleaned up and I am now working like mad out there ever weekend.  Glass is unlike any other artistic material I have ever used.  When working with paints, the results for color are predictable (red and blue make purple).  That is not always the case with glass, as the chemical compounds that provide the coloration can produce interesting results, as can the amount of heat you use, the time it is heated, how much propane is in the flame, and a dozen other factors.  Heck, even the rod of glass can change color when inserted into the flame (or again when it is annealed).  It all makes for some pretty fantastic experiments (which is something I love doing anyways). 

So I am steadily working to improve my technique in making beads, with two goals in mind.  The first is to be better able to reproduce period bead types, and the second is for some more mundane artistic exploration with glass.  I am completely in love with this art (and have not yet set the garage on fire)!

Along with this hands-on practice, I am trying to read and take notes on my stash of period glass literature.  I have so many questions surrounding frequency of beads in graves (in relation to other aspects of the graves) that I hope to answer and compile into something useful.

Below are a few images of my revised studio set up, as well as some of my (non-period) experiments with glass.  Many of them are just my testing colors of glass that I have, and others are exploring techniques.