- Museum number
- ML.1536
- Description
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Six glass beads, strung on modern wire with stone pendant or touchstone: (a) eroded blue spheroid bead; (b)-(c) two plain blue spheroid beads; (d) plain blue melon bead, with six segments; (e)-(f) two translucent and opaque white marbled spheroid beads, decorated with two rows of three circles in rust and white with blue central eye; (g) a rectangular stone pendant or touchstone in brown fine-grained rock probably siliceous siltstone or metamorphosed tuff. Long parallel-sided shape with rounded corners and slim rectangular profile.
- Production date
- 400 BC - 100 BC (circa)
- Dimensions
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Length: 58.20 millimetres (touchstone)
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Weight: 24 grammes (restrung, total)
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Thickness: 9 millimetres (touchstone)
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Width: 14 millimetres (touchstone)
- Curator's comments
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Stead and Rigby 1999
Findspot: Marson (Marne)
Morel's report on the excavations at Marson was read at the Sorbonne on 4 April 1874 and again at Châlons-sur-Marne on 27 October 1874. His publication (Morel, L., 1874a, La découverte de sépultures gauloises au territoire de Marson, ‘Mémoires de la société d’agriculture, commerce, sciences et arts du department de la Marne’ (1873-4), 179-94.), virtually identical to the version in Morel, L., 1898, ‘La Champagne souterraine’ Reims, 5-20, is accompanied by the first six plates of the ‘Album’.
(b)'La voie de Lépine'
A huge cemetery at the top of and on the slopes of a hill, extending for almost a kilometre. Morel excavated here between April 1873 and February 1874 and found about 200 burials scattered over about a kilometre, sometimes in groups of four or five. Some graves held more than one skeleton, with two or three burials superimposed, or two side by side. Most graves were orientated west-east, from 1 m to 1.5 m deep, and filled with terre noire, and almost half of them had been disturbed previously. Smith, R.A., 1925, ‘A guide to the antiquities of the Early Iron Age’ (second edition), London, 64-5.
Grave 25: A grave group found by a local man about 1870. The grave contained ML.1538, ML.1545, ML.1546, ML.1535 and ML.1536.
Context: Beads and Amulets
There are beads in amber, coral, bone and glass in the Morel Collection, and where the details have been recorded, they are typically found in the graves of girls and women. They were found singly or in groups, separate - possibly because the original organic string had disintegrated - or strung onto bronze wire, fine strip, bangles or torcs. One bone amulet bears traces of having been threaded onto iron strip, a fairly common practice; there are several examples in other collections from La Tène cemeteries in Champagne, e.g. Beine ‘l’Argentelle’ grave 9 where they were used for pendants strung on a torc.
Due to the limitations on shape imposed by the techniques of working the different materials, the beads have first been divided by material before the shapes were classified.
Glass: Glass beads may have been produced before 2000 BC in southern France, while highly coloured moulded vessels were common around the Mediterranean throughout the Bronze Age (Ambert, P., and Barge-Mahieu, 1989 Essai sur les perles en verre antérieures à l’Age du fer en Languedoc et en Provence, in M. Feugère, ‘Le Verre préromain en Europe occidentale’, Montagnac, 7-18). Glass was made into vivid, iridescent and permanent colours to produce otherwise unobtainable decorative effects and even transmitting coloured light. In such circumstances it is not surprising that 'eye motifs', where a white glass rim or 'iris' encircled a round blue 'pupil', were popular.
There are almost 200 glass beads, 150 of which are tiny plain mini-loops in dark blue, the remainder are more typical in size. Morel lists more which cannot be equated with any unprovenanced beads in the collection. There were 48 in a necklace of glass and amber beads in Bergères-les-Vertus b, 80 plain and one decorated 'eye' bead in Courtisols b grave 8 and 15 small plain blue beads in grave 10; if the small beads were mini-rings then this could be ML.2191. At Somme-Suippe 15 beads of blue glass were found with 15 rings forming either a necklace or a belt.
All but eight of the surviving beads are translucent blue, the exceptions are opaque yellow or opaque and clear white mixed to produce a marbled effect. In all, six are decorated with blue and white 'eyes', six with a running scroll and one with spirals. Such beads first appear in burials early in the fifth century BC at Villeneuve-Renneville graves 35 and 56 and Saint-Sulpice, Vaud, Switzerland (Kaenel, G., and Müller, F., 1991, The Swiss plateau, in S. Moscatic, ed., ‘The Celts’, Milan, 253). Necklaces occur in burials at Arras, Cowlam, Danes Graves and Garton Slack, east Yorkshire (Stead 1979, fig. 31).
Blue, yellow and white were produced by adding tin or antimony to the silica of the frit and melting it in an oxidizing atmosphere (Appendix 2, Table 7).
Bead shapes:
Glass 2: Spheroid beads, diameter greater than thickness. Plain and decorated examples.
The most common shape for plain and decorated beads. The size range is concentrated between 11 and 14 mm in diameter, with the equivalent thickness 8 to 11 mm. The translucent colours are cobalt blue, blue/black and white, the opaque are white and yellow; decorated types in blue glass are limited to this shape.
Glass 5: Segmented melon beads.
There are three examples in typical translucent blue glass, two with seven and one (broken and incomplete) with eight segments. The size range of the complete beads is 11-12 mm in diameter and 9-11 mm in length; the broken bead is longer and cylindrical. Other examples, also in blue, were found at Gourgançon (Charpy, J.-J., and Roualet, P., 1987, ‘Céramique peinte gauloise en Champagne’ (exh. cat., Eperney, 10/6 – 30/10/1987), no. 75).
Context also beads strung on modern wire.
Bibliography: Morel, L., 1898, ‘La Champagne souterraine’ Reims, pl. 3, fig. 17. Re-strung onto modern wire as in the original illustration, where one red segmented melon bead is shown, presumably a colouring error. Only the touchstone is mentioned in the text.
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Stead and Rigby 1999 (Touchstone)
Strung on modern wire with six beads, illustrated by Morel in a female grave with another strung bead ornament.
Context: Beads and Amulets; Touchstones, whetstones or amulets.
Touchstones were used for assaying the purity of gold by comparing the colour of streaks made on the surface of metal of unknown purity with that made on alloys of known composition. Generally small fragments of fine-grained black stone, chiefly siliceous siltstone, were used (Moore, D. T., and Oddy, W. A., 1985, Touchstones: some aspects of their nomenclature, petrography and provenance, ‘Journal of Archaeological Science’ (12), p. 59-80).
The method has been in use since at least the sixth century BC when it was mentioned in Greek literature. The presence of one possible example strung with glass beads to form one of a pair of pendants or earrings may indicate the use of black touchstones in Iron Age Gaul, but there are problems with this interpretation (Morel 1898, pl. 3, fig. 16a; Fig. 132). The grave is said to be that of a woman rather than a man, because the grave-goods - a torc, two bracelets and two beaded ornaments - are types that do not occur with males. It seems improbable but by no means impossible that a woman would have been directly connected with the working of precious metals; it may of course have been an heirloom, which functioned as an amulet (Morel, L., 1898b, De la rareté des bijoux d’or dans les necropolis de la Marne, ‘Association française pour l’avancement des science’ (1898, II), p. 16). Since it is now strung on modern wire and not an ancient wire artefact it could have been added at some time after discovery. No others have been recorded in Iron Age burials in Gaul whilst examples have been recorded in burials of the post-Roman period in Britain and they may therefore be more at home in burials of the Merovingian period. Alternative interpretations are that some were whetstones or amulets.
Two examples in the Morel Collection were included in the survey by Moore and Oddy and thin-sectioned.
1. Long parallel-sided shape with rounded corners and slim rectangular profile.
- Location
- On display (G50/dc25)
- Department
- Britain, Europe and Prehistory
- Registration number
- ML.1536