We present the tenth publication in the PCMA Monograph Series: Glass bead trade in Northeast Africa. The evidence from Meroitic and post-Meroitic Nubia. The volume is authored by Dr Joanna Then-Obłuska.
Strings of colorful glass beads were a popular commodity traded throughout ancient Nubia in the earlier half of the first millennium AD. Combining macroscopic examination with laboratory analyses, the author breaks new ground in Nubian studies, establishing diagnostic markers for a study of trading markets and broader economic trends in Meroitic and post-Meroitic Nubia.
Archaeometric results, lucidly presented and discussed, identify the origins of the glass from which the beads under investigation were made. The demonstrated South Indian/Sri Lankan provenance of some of the ready-made beads from Nubian burial contexts and a reconstruction of their distribution patterns in Northeast Africa is the first undisputed proof of contacts between Nubia and the Red Sea coast. Reaching beyond that, it shows Nubia’s involvement in the Asian maritime trade, whether directly or indirectly, during a period of intensive interchanges between the 4th and 6th centuries AD.
The study was funded from the National Science Centre grant DEC-2013/09/D/HS3/04508 for the project A reconstruction of trade contacts in Northeast Africa: an interdisciplinary analysis of Nubian personal adornment directed by Dr Then-Obłuska and afiliated at the PCMA. Some of the objects analysed in the monograph have been excavated by PCMA missions in Sudan.
Joanna Then-Obłuska is a researcher at the University of Warsaw and an Associate of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, specializing in the archaeology of Northeast Africa. She received her PhD in Archaeology from the Jagiellonian University (2008). Since then her projects have focused primarily on issues of society and trade, looking at ancient Sudanese and Egyptian beads and jewelry in terms of both material and bead-making techniques. She uses archaeometric results to understand the economic role of bead imports during the time of an intensive Indian Ocean trade. Recently, her research has branched off into Ethiopia.
Joanna Then-Obłuska with Barbara Wagner, Glass bead trade in Northeast Africa. The evidence from Meroitic and post-Meroitic Nubia (=PAM Monograph Series 10), Warsaw: PCMA, WUW, 2019
https://doi.org/10.31338/uw.9788323539070
The book can be purchased from the publisher, University of Warsaw Press online bookstore as a hard copy or PDF file