Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2007, Qupperneq 21

Medieval and early modern Beads from Iceland
Mould-pressed beads
Mould-pressed beads were made by using
various methods of transferring glass in a
liquid state to a mould. To do that the glass
had to be drawn, blown or wound but with
many of the mould-pressed beads the
original method of manufacture cannot
be detected and therefore these beads can
only be classified by their second stage
of manufacture. Mould-pressed beads
can be made out of one or two pieces of
glass in a double mould and usually the
seam where the moulds come together is
the best indicator of beads of this type.
Most moulded beads have a so-called
equator seam, where the seam is trans-
verse to the perforation, but others, espe-
cially those with an elongated shape have
longitudinal seams, parallel to the axis of
the perforation (Sprague 2000:210-212).
The largest quantity of mould-pressed
glass beads comes from Bohemia and it
is likely that most of the moulded beads
found in Iceland came from there.
Altogether 11 mould-pressed
beads have been found in Iceland. Only
two of these come from excavations
while the remainder are stray finds. The
majority of these beads are with multi-
ple, facetted surfaces but a single bead, a
stray find from Borgarfjörður (Þjms. 884,
found in 1872) is a dark blue hemisphere
with facetted stripes running parallel to
the hole. The other mould-pressed beads
have the same surface pattem (a diamond
pattern), but vary in size, shape and col-
our. Most common are fairly large beads
(running from 8-18 mm in diameter) from
reddish-brown or colourless glass. The
two exceptions are smaller (both 6,2-6,5
mm in diameter) and rounded. One is in
black glass (Þjms. 4830) and was a stray
find from Rangárvallasýsla given to the
National Museum around 1900 and the
other a turquoise glass (1987-050 - see
figure 3, nr. 10) from the excavations at
Bessastaðir and is likely from the middle
of the 18th century.
Blown beads
Blown beads are defined not only by the
method of manufacture but also by the
geometry of the bead, which is often lik-
ened to a Christmas tree ornament. There
are different techniques of making blown
beads. They can either be free blown or
blown into a mould, but their main char-
acteristic is that they have very thin walls
(Sprague 2000:212). This feature causes
them to have a very low survival rate in
archaeological contexts and in Iceland
only one clear example of this kind of
bead has been found.3 That bead (EAS04-
15 - see figure 3 - nr. 11) was found in
the backfill of a grave in a cemetery of
Eystri-Ásar in south east Iceland and is
likely from the 19th century. It is elongat-
ed, with about 25 grooves running paral-
lel to the hole and two raised ridges in the
middle of the bead. This type of bead was
made by blowing glass into a grooved
tube, reheating the middle of the bead
while rotating it and forcing air into the
tube. This was done twice, creating the
raised ridges in the middle. Then the
edges were reheated and softened
(Sprague 2000:213).
Fired beads
Another major method of producing glass
beads is to make them from granular mate-
rial that is compressed and further heated
3 Although one bead fragment (Varmá 1968:282) from a chapel at Varmá in southwest Iceland might possibly have been
blown. The fragment is too small to be analyzed with certainty.
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