File:Iron Age bead (FindID 879189).jpg

English: A glass late Roman to Anglo-Saxon bead dating to the fourth to seventh centuries AD. The bead is globular and decorated with white and pale blue crossed waves and yellow and green eyes.

It is made from opaque black glass with six pellets of opaque yellow glass arranged around the edge. Each yellow glass pellet has a translucent green glass pellet near its centre. These pellets are known as 'eyes'. Additionally there is a pattern of raised lines of opaque white and pale blue glass, known as crossed waves. These lines are incomplete, indicating that some of the glass has worn away. The decoration is arranged around one end of the perforation, perhaps indicating that the bead was worn with the perforation pointing forward and back rather than from side to side, so that the decoration was visible. Overall, the bead measures 18.2 mm in diameter and 10.1 mm thick. The perforation is 5.8 mm in diameter. It weighs 4.76 g.

This bead fits into Margaret Guido's Schedule 2 Type viii ('Black' (or dark) globular beads with complex crossed waves and eyes or spots) and Type ix ('Black' globular beads with white or coloured crossed waves, with or without eyes or spots) (Guido 1999, pp 25-26 and Plate 2). Such beads are more common on the Continent but are relatively rare in Roman and early Anglo-Saxon contexts in Britain. They are thought to date mainly to the sixth century AD, but with some appearing in the fifth or even earlier, or as late as the seventh century.

Thank you to Elizabeth Foulds for identifying this bead.