After the neck ring was finished, I decided to start cranking out cobalt glass beads in the studio.  Cobalt glass is beautiful and is ubiquitous in the ancient world.  It seems that every culture both had, and coveted more of, this type of glass.  (And fortunately, mundanely it is one of the least expensive colors of soft glass that exists.)

While looking though finds from graves near the salt mines of Dürrnberg, I noticed a couple of necklaces comprised of only cobalt glass and amber and I found them very striking.  They appear at other sites as well, including some from Switzerland.  Realistically, both bead types are so prevalent that I have to imagine this type of jewelry is not at all uncommon (and both plain amber and plain cobalt necklaces show in in graves as well).  I decided that I would craft one based loosely on grave 193#2 from the Römersteig grave group.
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I started crafting my cobalt glass beads and also started researching vendors for the amber.  I ended up going with Baltic Amber Masters, from Estonia.  The beads in his shop were perfect for my project, being not perfectly spherical in shape ​but still catching the light beautifully.  I contacted him about a custom order (as the necklaces he had had more beads than I currently needed for this project) and he showed me several options from stock and even tossed in a few larger beads as a gift.  I absolutely recommend this vendor.

In the extant piece the cobalt glass beads ranged from .95-1.1 cm and the amber was .65-1 cm.  The amber I was able to order ranged up to 1.3 cm, and I made my cobalt beads in a range that compliments that size.  My clasp is an S-hook and ring, even though no clasp was found in the grave to my knowledge.

The necklace below is not Celtic but rather is for a friend who has some early Greek clothing for Pennsic.  The beads, including SO MUCH COBALT GLASS, are all of types from Greece or Egypt from about 600-300BCE.  Several of them also show up in Celtic graves from the period as well.

Last summer I made an a skirt suitable for someone in Northern, and possibly, Central Europe that could possibly have been worn from 200ish BCE to 200ishCE.  There are a lot of ifs and ishes in that because it was purely an experimental item, based on multiple finds, for me to just test the waters to see if I wanted to go that far backwards in time.

By the time I finished the skirt, I had decided I was more interested in Central Europe than Northern (despite the time I took to look at some books about the Jastorf Culture) and realized I wanted to take a fresh look at early Celtic material culture.  I started to research early Celtic beads (admittedly with no attention being paid to regions, but some attention paid to time period) and I crafted a necklace of glass beads that appealed to me.  I make no assertion that this necklace is appropriate for a single specific time and place, but I am very fond of it now and am happy that I made it.

I ordered a mass of books from Germany for my textiles research for early Celtic clothing in February.  They have been held up in US Customs since March 23.  That means I had to find some other way to occupy my time given that leaving the house/property is not much of an option right now.  So in addition to starting a garden, I decided to craft a new-to-me Celtic necklace.

While the iconic torque/torc, with its decorated finials, is the the symbol of the Celtic age to many, far simpler neck rings were also in fashion, and where possibly more common in certain times and places.  (Note here that the term neckring and torc are also used interchangeably, but I am opting to make a personal distinction here with my terminology to hopefully avoid some confusion.)

While reading through the volumes of material that I have collected about the graves from Hallein near the Dürrnberg Saltmines in Austria, I found that an incredible number of the graves contained very simple neckrings in bronze.  They seemed to be fashioned out of wire and often had some method of closure on them, whether it was ends that hooked together, or hammered ends that had holes punched in them (some even had traces of chain in one side), or other mechanisms.

In addition to the neckrings, several of the graves had very interesting triangular pendants in bronze.  They were not all identical but were all roughly an inch across.  Some had finials at the corners, others had a decorative “bump” in the center of each leg.  In some cases it appears that they were part of a necklace, and in others it is unsure.

I have also collected the data from the Durrnberg finds regarding frequency of decorated neck rings, types of closures, and where the triangular pendants have been found, but I need to compile it into a document digestible to those who do not read my rambling shorthand.  At some point I hope to upload that information here.
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