Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2007, Síða 22

Elín Hreiðarsdóttir
(Sprague 1985:211). This type is some-
times called porcelain or baked beads and
is considered to be the oldest glass bead
technique. Although still popular in many
parts of the world such a bead has yet to
be found in an archaeological context in
Iceland.
Amber beads
Of the little less than a hundred amber
beads from medieval and early modern
times found in Iceland about half come
from a dated context. Just over half of
these dated beads (about 54%) are from
the 13/14,h-16th centuries with the rest
(46%) from 17th-19,h centuries. These
numbers, even if built on a small dataset,
could be an indicator that the continu-
ity of amber beads from the Viking age
to later centuries was greater than most
other bead groups.
Amber is found in various plac-
es all around the globe (for example New
Jersey and Arkansas in North America,
Sicily in Italy and Myanmar in Asia) but
the most renowned is probably the so
called Baltic amber that washes up along
the shores of the Baltic Sea and as far
away as Norway, Holland, Germany and
England. Amber comes in many colour
tones depending on its origin, exposion
to sun and seawater, and the amount of
air bubbles in the material. The more bub-
bles it has the lighter the colour and more
opaque the amber. Such amber is often
called bone/cloudy amber or bastard
amber, the last term probably referring to
the fact that it is not considered as good
material for jewelry as the clear amber
because it does not polish as well (Jensen
1982; Grimaldi 1996 andFraquet 1987).
Amber is a soft material (hard-
ness 2-2,5 on the Mohs scale) and is
therefore an easy material to work with.
Because of this it is likely that small-scale
amber bead production took place in pre-
vious centuries wherever amber was
found.4 It is possible that some of the Ice-
landic amber beads might have come
from such small-scale production but it is
likely that most came from the more cen-
tralized workshops in central and north-
eastern Europe. In the late 13,h century
the Teutonic Knights of Prussia created a
monopoly on amber production in the
Samland Peninsula, aiming mainly to
supply the market for paternoster beads.
By the 15th century this monopoly was
transferred to a series of guilds (for exam-
ple in the cities Liibeck and Danzig). In
the city of Bruges in Belgium large-scale
amber working occurred in medieval
times and in the 14th century more than
three hundred amber craftsmen were
recorded working on the material in the
city. The most fruitful extraction area of
Baltic amber has, for a long time, been
the eastern Baltic, more specifically the
Kaliningrad area (formerly Königsberg).
There amber was collected after storms
or with nets in small boats. By the mid
1800s surface amber had been exhausted,
leading to the development of mining; in
1862 mine workers extracted 2000 kg of
amber. By 1870 a private company, the
Stantien and Becker mining firm, made a
contract with the Prussian government
giving them exclusive rights for mining in
the area. The company was very success-
ful in developing methods for mining
amber and was producing more than
50.000 kg of amber a year before the turn
Excavation in London have for example reveled small scale amber production from Baltic amber, possibly collected on the
eastem shore of England, see Egan and Pritchard 2002.
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