From sand to sea: tracing the production and trade in glass beads from the 10th-century Cirebon shipwreck in the Java Sea

Author(s):  
Carolyn Swan

Around the year 970 CE, a merchant ship carrying an assortment of goods from East Africa, Persia, India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and China foundered and sank to the bottom of the Java Sea. Thousands of beads made from many different materials—ceramic, jet, coral, banded stone, lapis lazuli, rock crystal, sapphire, ruby, garnet, pearl, gold, and glass—attest to the long-distance movement and trade of these small and often precious objects throughout the Indian Ocean world. The beads made of glass are of particular interest, as closely-dated examples are very rare and there is some debate as to where glass beads were being made and traded during this period of time. This paper examines 18 glass beads from the Cirebon shipwreck that are now in the collection of Qatar Museums, using a comparative typological and chemical perspective within the context of the 10th-century glass production. Although it remains uncertain where some of the beads were made, the composition of the glass beads points to two major production origins for the glass itself: West Asia and South Asia.

Heritage ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 2343-2369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farahnaz Koleini ◽  
Philippe Colomban ◽  
Innocent Pikirayi ◽  
Linda C. Prinsloo

Glass beads have been produced and traded for millennia all over the world for use as everyday items of adornment, ceremonial costumes or objects of barter. The preservation of glass beads is good and large hoards have been found in archaeological sites across the world. The variety of shape, size and colour as well as the composition and production technologies of glass beads led to the motivation to use them as markers of exchange pathways covering the Indian Ocean, Africa, Asia, Middle East, the Mediterranean world, Europe and America and also as chronological milestones. This review addresses the history of glass production, the methodology of identification (morphology, colour, elemental composition, glass nanostructure, colouring and opacifying agents and secondary phases) by means of laboratory based instruments (LA-ICP-MS, SEM-EDS, XRF, NAA, Raman microspectroscopy) as well as the mobile instruments (pXRF, Raman) used to study glass beads excavated from sub-Saharan African sites. Attention is paid to the problems neglected such as the heterogeneity of glass (recycled and locally reprocessed glass). The review addresses the potential information that could be extracted using advanced portable methods of analysis.


Antiquity ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 67 (256) ◽  
pp. 609-612 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Hayden ◽  
D. E. Nelson ◽  
Jean Cataliotti-Valdina

A fragment of Cassis rufa shell, in modern times a species of the Indian Ocean, was reliably reported from the deep Mousterian deposits excavated at the beginning of the century from the Grotte du Prince, Monaco. Because its known habitat is so distant and exotic, there has always been question about the specimen's authenticity. A radiocarbon determination shows it to be recent, and no evidence for long-distance movement of shell in the European Middle Palaeolithic.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-66
Author(s):  
Gwyn Campbell

This article explores the rise and development, from about 300 bce to c. 1750 of an Indian Ocean World 'global economy' – a long-distance system of exchange that linked East Africa and the Middle East to South Asia, South-east Asia and East Asia. Focusing on human-environment interaction, Campbell challenges spatial and temporal paradigms based on the conventional beliefs that humans alone are the catalyst of historical change, and that Europeans gained economic ascendancy in the region from the time of the 'Voyages of Discovery'.


Author(s):  
Ruby Maloni

Gujarat was concentric to the early modern Indian Ocean world. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the fine tuning of long distance trading systems. In South East Asia, the Indo-Portuguese trade network flourished in the sixteenth century, followed by the English and the Dutch in the seventeenth. Equilibrium was established between European and Asian traders, both indispensable to the other. Profitable trade in pepper and spices in the eastern archipelago was based on cotton textiles from Gujarat. In the sixteenth century, Cambay stretched out two arms—towards Aden and Malacca. Commercial connections included ports like Acheh, Kedah, Tenasserim, Pegu, Pase, and Pidie. In the seventeenth century, Surat’s mercantile marine facilitated the consolidation of Gujarati trade. This chapter shows how Gujarati merchant diaspora was intrinsic to the intricate patterns of trade practices and traditions of the Indian Ocean.


Antiquity ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Jennifer Craig

Morphological and compositional analysis of glass beads from three shipwrecks in the Indian Ocean world has increased our understanding of the chronology and distribution of mid-fifteenth to mid-seventeenth century glass.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Editors of the JIOWS

The editors are proud to present the first issue of the fourth volume of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. This issue contains three articles, by James Francis Warren (Murdoch University), Kelsey McFaul (University of California, Santa Cruz), and Marek Pawelczak (University of Warsaw), respectively. Warren’s and McFaul’s articles take different approaches to the growing body of work that discusses pirates in the Indian Ocean World, past and present. Warren’s article is historical, exploring the life and times of Julano Taupan in the nineteenth-century Philippines. He invites us to question the meaning of the word ‘pirate’ and the several ways in which Taupan’s life has been interpreted by different European colonists and by anti-colonial movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. McFaul’s article, meanwhile, takes a literary approach to discuss the much more recent phenomenon of Somali Piracy, which reached its apex in the last decade. Its contribution is to analyse the works of authors based in the region, challenging paradigms that have mostly been developed from analysis of works written in the West. Finally, Pawelczak’s article is a legal history of British jurisdiction in mid-late nineteenth-century Zanzibar. It examines one of the facets that underpinned European influence in the western Indian Ocean World before the establishment of colonial rule. In sum, this issue uses two key threads to shed light on the complex relationships between European and other Western powers and the Indian Ocean World.


Author(s):  
Samia Khatun

Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of 'Muslim-majority' countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonized by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future.


2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (SI 2 - 6th Conf EFPP 2002) ◽  
pp. 542-544
Author(s):  
R. Pokorný ◽  
M. Porubová

Under greenhouse conditions 12 maize hybrids derived from crosses of four resistant lines with several lines of different level of susceptibility were evaluated for resistance to Czech isolate of Sugarcane mosaic virus (SCMV). These hybrids were not fully resistant to isolate of SCMV, but the symptoms on their newly growing leaves usually developed 1 to 3 weeks later in comparison with particular susceptible line, the course of infection was significantly slower and rate of infection lower. As for mechanisms of resistance, the presence of SCMV was detected by ELISA in inoculated leaves both of resistant and susceptible lines, but virus was detected 7 days later in resistant line. Systemic infection developed only in susceptible lines. These results indicate restriction of viral long distance movement in the resistant line.


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