- Follow Stringing the Past on WordPress.com
Funding!
If you're interested in helping to fund this research in any way, go check out my Fundrazr page!-
Recent Stuff:
- Subjectivity and 3D Modelling in Archaeology
- What is a Bead?
- Update: 10 June 2017
- 3D Modelling Techniques
- Excavating My Own Research
- The Early Medieval Archaeology Student Symposium 2016
- What is the Purpose of Heritage Visualisation?
- Photography and Its Effects on Museums
- Bead Design: Take 2
- Stereoscopes and Archaeology
- Spiral Beads
- Museum Highlights: National Museum of Scotland, Part 1
- Stripes, Swirls, and Squiggles: Line Styles
- Swag Beads
- Museum Highlights: Upcountry History Museum
Tag Archives: glass
Spiral Beads
One of my favourite bead designs is the spiral bead. These beads are always wound and tend to be either normal, circular beads, triangular beads or (technically) hexagonal. They have anywhere between two and four spirals that radiate out until … Continue reading
Posted in Bead Basics, Bead Types
Tagged archaeology, artefact, bead, classification, design, europe, glass, scotland
Leave a comment
Museum Highlights: National Museum of Scotland, Part 1
The National Museum of Scotland holds a very dear place in my heart, since I spent the majority of my MLitt dissertation working feverishly on the bead collections here. My first visit to the museum was actually for a class. … Continue reading
Posted in Archaeological Beads, Museum Beads
Tagged archaeology, artefact, bead, faience, glass, museum, rome, scotland
Leave a comment
Stripes, Swirls, and Squiggles: Line Styles
Line style is a fairly straightforward category. This basically describes the pattern of any lines that decorate the bead – not the pattern those lines make, but the pattern they have. There are only a few options for this. First … Continue reading
Swag Beads
Swag beads are probably my favourite type of design, largely because of the name. It really is a technical term, and I am all for bringing it back into popular usage in bead studies. Swag on a bead simply refers … Continue reading
Posted in Bead Basics, Bead Types
Tagged archaeology, artefact, bead, design, europe, glass, scotland, swag, typology
3 Comments
Museum Highlights: Upcountry History Museum
Last Friday, I was down in Greenville, South Carolina for my twin brother’s wedding. My family and I flew into Charlotte, getting into Greenville around 11:30 in the morning. We had a good 4 hours before we could check into … Continue reading
Posted in Archaeological Beads, Museum Beads
Tagged archaeology, artefact, bead, cornaline d'allepo, eye, glass, museum, north america, trade, travel
Leave a comment
Stripes, Swirls, and Squiggles: Design Shape
Aside from the number of colours involved in the design, the first element I record is the shape itself. This can be any design that isn’t a line, like eyes, flowers, spirals, stars, fish, birds, etc. The simplest shape is … Continue reading
Posted in Bead Basics, Methodologies
Tagged archaeology, artefact, bead, design, glass, methodology
1 Comment
Zone Beads
Zone beads are another pretty large category of polychrome bead, though they only seem to be called zone beads in Asia. Zone beads are any bead with one or more lines around the centre, running perpendicular to the perforation, such … Continue reading
Posted in Bead Basics, Bead Types
Tagged archaeology, artefact, bead, design, glass, typology, zone
Leave a comment
Museum Highlights: Historic Jamestowne
After looking at all these beads, a lot of you are probably wondering where you might be able to see all these beads, or at least examples of them. Archaeological beads are never terribly far away – nearly every museum … Continue reading
Posted in Archaeological Beads, Museum Beads
Tagged archaeology, artefact, bead, chevron, glass, museum, nueva cadiz, rawrenock, shell, stone, trade, travel
Leave a comment
Stripes, Swirls, and Squiggles: Documenting Bead Designs
Documenting design is a highly complex thing to do. Yesterday’s post talked only about eye beads, but we saw that there is a large variety of what might be called eye beads in the archaeological record. So how do we … Continue reading
Posted in Bead Basics, Methodologies
Tagged archaeology, artefact, bead, design, glass, methodology
1 Comment
Recycled Blue-Green Bead from Thailand
So, I was going through my older bead photos for some newer posts and came across this one. Somehow I had forgotten about this bead, even though I focused on it quite heavily when I first documented it. It’s a … Continue reading
Posted in Archaeological Beads, Museum Beads
Tagged archaeology, artefact, asia, bead, classification, color, colour, glass, indo-pacific, recycling, seed bead, southeast asia, thailand
Leave a comment
Stringing the Past 