EARLY MEDIEVAL BEAD

410

Broken conical blue glass bead with repeated inlaid white dot with inner red dot decoration along the face. This is Guido's type 6xiii, blue beads with red-centred white eyes, found in Cambs, Kent, Hants, Norfolk and Suffolk (Guido 1999, 273 and pl. 5). It is not immediately apparent to which Brugmann Group this bead type should belong; it is not Dot Regular, which has monochrome dots, but it may be Mosaic. Although Mosaic beads are supposed to belong to Brugmann's Group A2b (dating to 530-580), one Guido parallel was found at Brandon in Suffolk, a settlement site which dates from the mid 7th to 9th century, and so this bead type may continue later.