Abstract
Glass beads have been produced and traded for millennia all over the world for use as everyday items of adornment, ceremonial costumes or objects of barter. The preservation of glass beads is good and large hoards have been found in archaeological sites across the world. The variety of shape, size and colour as well as the composition and production technologies of glass beads led to the motivation to use them as markers of exchange pathways covering the Indian Ocean, Africa, Asia, Middle East, the Mediterranean world, Europe and America and also as chronological milestones. This review addresses the history of glass production, the methodology of identification (morphology, colour, elemental composition, glass nanostructure, colouring and opacifying agents and secondary phases) by means of laboratory based instruments (LA-ICP-MS, SEM-EDS, XRF, NAA, Raman microspectroscopy) as well as the mobile instruments (pXRF, Raman) used to study glass beads excavated from sub-Saharan African sites. Attention is paid to the problems neglected such as the heterogeneity of glass (recycled and locally reprocessed glass). The review addresses the potential information that could be extracted using advanced portable methods of analysis.
Highlights
We present here the first review of research conducted on trade beads from African sites covered in the literature and discuss about all identification methods for morphology and colour, elemental and molecular composition, pigments and secondary phases
Since the beginning of the first millennium AD, the Indian Ocean was organized into a place around which the first world trade system was built, mostly with the assistance of monsoon winds [3,4], connecting the Near/Middle East, India, South Asia, China and Africa [3,4,5]
We review here the studies used to identify glass bead technology, provenance and production date regarding beads excavated in Africa
Summary
We present here the first review of research conducted on trade beads from African sites covered in the literature and discuss about all identification methods for morphology and colour, elemental and molecular composition, pigments and secondary phases. The production of most historic glasses was obtained by reducing the melting temperature of silica (sand) through adding fluxing (sodium-, potassium- or lead-rich compounds) and stabilizing (calcium or aluminium based compounds) agents to form a non-crystalline solid that is often transparent. This technique was first mastered to make glazed artefacts around 5000–4000 BC [9] and the first synthetic glass, or more precisely a coloured incompletely molten material was made in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley circa 2000 BC to replace semi-precious stones and gems [10,11,12].
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