bead

This bead was formed by winding opaque deep blue glass around a mandrel. The decoration, consisting of nine opaque yellow spirals arranged in three registers, was applied as trails of molten glass, which were marvered until they were flush with the surface of the object. The bead is intact, except for minute chips around the perforation. The bead was acquired at auction in London. According to the sale catalog, it was found, together with a fragment of another bead, at St. Brides Major, a village in the county of Glamorgan, in southern Wales, in 2000. The object belongs to the Late Iron Age “Oldbury” type of glass bead. The type takes its name from Oldbury, a well-known archaeological site in Kent, southeastern England, where similar beads were discovered. Such beads, which may be imitations of Continental beads of the period between the mid-second and late first centuries B.C., have a scattered distribution in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, with the majority of find-places in southern England. Most datable finds were recovered from contexts of the first century B.C. This example was recorded under the Welsh Portable Antiquities Scheme, a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public. The removal of antiquities from the United Kingdom is strictly controlled, and the bead was granted an export license to leave the country. Beads of this type are described in Margaret Guido, The Glass Beads of the Prehistoric and Roman Periods in Britain and Ireland, London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1978, pp. 53–57.