The world on a string

Abstract

By inventorying and analysing glass beads from the Egypt collection of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, this project looks at how even the smallest archaeological objects can help us chart the global networks that connected large parts of the ancient world, up until 1000 CE. Glass beads remain a notoriously understudied category of archaeological material. Side-lined and traditionally often described as ‘trinkets for women’, beads were sometimes deemed too insignificant to depict in official archaeological reports. Until quite recently, apart from typological studies that approached glass beads as a complementary method for site-dating, bead research remained a relatively unknown field of expertise. But when we consider the wide-ranging archaeological potential of beads, they are actually highly suitable for a variety of research purposes: beads are durable, portable, ubiquitous, and highly variable objects that have been found in archaeological contexts spanning all across the globe. As such, they can be important datasets for an equally wide variety of studies of past cultures.