Abstract
The archaeological record of beads from eastern India has been sketchy and unstandardized. Here, an attempt is made to present a cohesive picture emphasizing regional patterns and preferences. When possible, glass beads are chronologically situated on the basis of excavated sites with firm chronological sequence. A general distribution of the beads is given according to colour, shape and manufacturing method when available. It appears from the current dataset that there is a distinction between the coastal sites and the inland sites. While the inland areas have more of green and blue glass, the coastal area has opaque red, yellow and orange. The barrel shapes predominate but an important proportion of cylinder circular and disc beads was also noted. In contrast, facetted beads are few. An interesting feature for eastern India is the presence of two types of composite glass bead that tend to imitate agate.
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Notes
- 1.
The Kushana kingdom dates from c. CE 30 to c. CE 375, until the invasions of the Kidarites. They ruled around the same time as the Western Satraps, the Satavahanas, and the first Gupta Empire rulers.
- 2.
Pearson’s correlation coefficient is a technique for investigating the relationship between quantitative and continuous variables.
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Acknowledgements
I thank IIT Gandhinagar for giving me an opportunity to take a fresh look at the glass beads; Piyali Sengupta, Director DAWB, for permitting me to study beads in their collection; Chinmay Kulkarni, IITGN for making the Map (Fig. 2); Dr. Sharmila Saha and Sumita Guha for their help.
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Chakraborty, S. (2021). Glass Beads of Eastern India (Early Historic Period). In: Kanungo, A.K., Dussubieux, L. (eds) Ancient Glass of South Asia. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3656-1_13
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