Ancient Technology

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the arrowheads used in the Viking Age and their distribution. The 187 excavation of Viking graves in the Black Earth of Birka region of Sweden, re-examined in 2019 by Price (Price, et al., 2019) and the finding of arrows and arrowheads where glaciers have melted in Norway, prompted my research into the forging techniques of specific arrowheads from these...

Ceramic crescents are a common find at Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites in southwestern Iberia (late fourth – third millennium BC). These objects, which often weigh less than 100 g and are perforated on each end, are typically referred to as loom weights and thought to be associated with textile production, although their function remains uncertain...

Many thousands of glass beads have been excavated from Early British cemeteries of the fifth and sixth centuries AD. Amongst these beads is a type that was particularly common: decorated polychrome beads in red, yellow, and green glass in a variety of styles and combinations. Birte Brugmann, in her 2004 analysis of Saxon-period glass beads (Brugmann, 2004), named these beads “Traffic Light” (TL) beads...