Summary
Until recently Merovingian glass beads were often described only cursorily by colour and shape. New analyses have shown that glass beads, together with other finds, are especially valuable for supplying additional information on chronology as well as economic, cultural and social history. Because of their widespread distribution beads are also useful for the ordering of graves with few other gravegoods. The study of the combination of different bead types per grave has been used for the chronological seriation and the horizontal stratigraphy of the female graves of the Alamannic cemetaries of Weingarten and Eichstetten, respectively.
The 801 graves from the Weingarten cemetery were analysed in three independent Correspondence Analyses (CA) based on: (i) weapons and belt fittings in male graves, (ii) beads in female graves, (iii) other costume ornaments in female graves. Analysis (ii) based on 42 bead types from 101 graves showed seven bead combination groups corresponding to nine fashion phases established by aid of other jewellery and dated by coin finds (Theune-Vogt 1991). A CA with 27 bead types from 51 graves in the Eichstetten cemetary allowed the isolation of five groups, the oldest group associated with special types of brooches, the four younger ones with different types of shoe fittings and earrings (Sasse 1986).
The comparison of bead inventaries of different cemetaries and analysts necessitates a standardized description code. Based on earlier work of Beck (1928) a team of experienced German archaeologists started in 1989 with the elaboration of a hierarchical thesaurus with tree structure allowing the indexation of beads with different degree of detail. The structure of the thesaurus is described in this paper.
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Ihm, P., Sasse, B., Theune, C. (1994). Merovingian Glass Beads: An Essay of Classification. In: Bock, HH., Lenski, W., Richter, M.M. (eds) Information Systems and Data Analysis. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-46808-7_40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-46808-7_40
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