 which is on oriental glass beads in Europe, mainly in central Europe from 8800 to 1000. A very brief outline. This is a very, very short paper. Why is glass important in studying early medieval Europe? Some of this repeats things that the previous two papers covered. Broder economic trends and networks, 8800 to 1000, and oriental glass beads in Europe. As we have heard before, there are three main glass types or flux types used, natron, halophytic, plant-esh, and wood-esh glass. And all three can be linked to broader areas of origin, such as Egypt and the Levant for the natron glass, Mesopotamia very broadly for the halophytic plant-esh glass and Northwestern Europe for the wood-esh glass. And there is a limited number of primary production centers, which we can, the glass types, not the production centers at this point, identify chemically, and these primary productions were exported to a wide range of areas. So this offers excellent opportunities for studying long-distance trade. And glass and especially glass beads are often overlooked. There is a social dimension to that. These are usually found at very simple rural sites. So it's poor people's things, it's not luxury items. It is usually found in women's graves. And so there is a gender dimension to it and there is a dimension, especially in the speaking world of research traditions. Early medieval archeology in an English tradition or a UK tradition is much more focused on landscape archeology than on material culture. I have had some senior male colleagues telling me when I tell them that I'm planning to work on this, kind of, what should that be good for? Because they see this as jewelry for poor women in an early medieval context and many people at least don't get the point that you can trace long-distance trade and much broader issues with glass beads than the lives and jewelry of simple women from the early medieval period. What sparked my personal interest in glass beads many years ago, I saw a presentation on Ribe, I don't quite remember by whom this was, it was not certain, and I saw this picture and I thought, well, they have our glass beads. These are glass beads from lower Austria. And I thought there must be a connection. Most of the central European material, central Europe meaning in this case, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia is not really present in the broader discussion of long-distance trade in early medieval Europe. And this is something I would like to change in the upcoming years. If we have a look at broader trends and networks and the geopolitical setting, here we have roughly the Carolingian Empire around 870. I apologize to all those gentlemen with a red-green color problem. Here we have the Byzantine Empire and the very strongly Byzantine-influenced Bulgarian Empire, and I work in that central area in between these two worlds. For Western Europe, as we have heard this before today, the main thing we know about trade and long-distance trade are Emporia. These are the first non-European, or this is the first non-European proto-urban or urban development in Northwestern Europe. And these are the first economic networks in the early Middle Ages in Northwestern Europe for bi-products, so low-value, high-volume products. And of course, it is slightly odd to speak about this in front of the author of the main book about Emporia, which basically laid the foundations for studying this sort of Northwestern European early trade science. This is all known to many of you, if not all of you. This is a very intense trade network functioning in bulk products, again, low-value, high-volume, such as the Maya-Lawakor instance. This is a map put together by Sirin a couple of years back, and it shows pretty well, maybe with the exception of Sweden and Norway, the limits and the area that this network covers. And we would have the same sort of trade network on the map if someone made the effort, which is a huge effort, to map pottery types, such as Badov Pottery, Mayan Pottery, or Pingstorf Pottery. So this is a very intense trade network in the North Sea world, but unfortunately, it doesn't really cover, if we go back to this map, it doesn't really go to the South. So it doesn't connect to things in Central Europe or further South. I will skip this slide. What we don't know a lot about, and this has come up today earlier, is the road of Byzantium in early medieval Western and Central Europe. This is basically a token image for Byzantium, a Byzantine let's see found in Hungary, dated to the eighties. The only problem is we have no, absolutely no one in this region in the eighties who could have received a letter with this let's see. And we very often talk about the relations between the Mediterranean and Northwestern Europe in the early medieval period. And if we go back to the map that I had here previously, it is, if you look at a map, very obvious that it is impossible to discuss this with our Central Europe in the picture. If you very simply have a look at geography, very often you consider Italy or you even consider these islands here and their own valley. Some people consider the rivers north of the Black Sea, but very often the Central European area is overlooked and not part of the conversation. And a very popular topic of recent years is slave trade, which does provide a connection between the Mediterranean and Northwestern Europe. Joachim Henning did this graph a couple of years back which looks wonderful. Many, many Roman iron shackles and a bit less, nothing really in the Merringian period, a bit more in the Carlingian world. But if you have a look at the scale on the left hand side, we are here with 30 pieces, which is not very much. And it's extremely difficult, as you will know, to show slave trade archeologically. And here we get to Piden. I don't really want to repeat his thesis. We have had this earlier today. He basically thought that there is a breakdown of connections between the Mediterranean and Northwestern Europe. And if we have a look at Milafiri glass beads or mosaic eye beads, we see that there is a connection between going from more or less the Northern Adriatic along the former Ember route, which connected the Adriatic with the Baltic. So along the Ember route up to the Danube and then along the Danube to the West in today's Germany or via today's Germany up to Scandinavia. This is a map done by Randhard André in the late 1960s as part of a PhD. I think it's not very widely used, at least in English speaking, research in German speaking research these widely used. And a new one to my knowledge has updated this ever since. He then went on to do something completely different, became a county archaeologist and never really worked on this again. And it would be high time to update this and produce a current map. Most of these that we see on here date from exactly that very late, very late eighth century and early ninth century. But it would be interesting to get a broader chronological analysis as to when these types of glass beads actually occur. Again, this is a map of the late 1960s. And André at that point thought of an Egyptian origin for these beads. Of course, entirely without archaeometric analysis, all he had was typological methods and the idea that because he thought it would be natron glass, which it isn't, he thought it would be natron glass and with natron coming from Egypt, he thought that would be the obvious place of origin. And the new one kind of came along in the 1970s and did a PhD on a broader range of glass beads and identified the ones that you can see in this picture at the lower end that these could be from the Islamic world reaching Northwestern Europe on two routes. It's a rather rough map. So this here is not very exact, but it gives you a basic idea of the two main routes, one via Central Europe, which goes more like this and one via the rivers north of the Black Sea and the Caracazes. And interestingly, the Eastern route includes the Ahems. The Western one via Central Europe doesn't. Why that is, I don't know, remains to be found out. And he, Kalma, thought that these beads would come from the nearest Middle East, but he also worked without any sort of chemical analysis. So this is all based on typological methods and we don't know an awful lot about bead production in the Middle East. So there is not much to compare with. And interestingly, it seems that Venice is not involved, although Venice does exist at this point already and is situated exactly there where this trade enters Central Europe, but there is not a large amount of finds from Venice excavations, which have been quite extensive by now. There is not a large amount of finds of these types of glass beads. And Kalma thought that the start of these routes, especially this Western route for the Oriental glass beads to come into Central Europe or Northwestern Europe, would be related to Charlemagne's contacts with the Arabic word, which does indeed go together with the chronology that we know at this point. There are scientific investigations of a handful of beads, especially these mosaic eye beads and they indeed show that they are halophytic plantage glass. And I'm happy to say that we now have, together with Andrew Shortland for the chemical part, we now have a new project to do chemical analysis and archeological analysis on Central European beads from Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, and hopefully in the future also Slovakia and Germany to get a bit more data on this. There is virtually no chemical data. So there is chemical data from the Mediterranean. There is chemical data from Northwestern Europe, but there is not very much to link the two together. And this is what the project hopes to change. So if we get back to Piren and reconsidering his thesis, was or how was medieval Northwestern Europe connected to the Mediterranean from the 8th century onwards? I must admit that the period I lived at is from the 8th century onwards. So it is more the later periods than the 7th and early 8th centuries. And the bulk import of glass beads shows a very strong connection with low value items reaching simple village communities in large amounts. But this connection is not really visible if we don't consider Central Europe, which is indeed a legacy of 20th century history. And the broader question is if glass is a part of a larger exchange pattern, of course what we are interested in is not necessarily single glass beads or even hundreds of glass beads traveling from A to B, but how the entire system worked. And is it possible that this is just the archeologically most obvious part? And if this is just the tip of the iceberg, what else was improved in this system? And we very often ask what traveled there. We know there was slave trade, we don't quite know how it worked and how large scale it was, but we often ask what moved the other way. Say we have the slaves moving from the north to the south, but what moves from the south to the north. And at this point, it is pretty much only the glass beads that we can show archeologically that moved in the other direction. So this could be a very interesting kind of token objects to show what to get behind slave trade and get behind broader issues of early medieval economy with a type of object that is archeologically relatively good to recognize, to identify, and to analyze chemically and to provenance at least in broad terms. And with homogeneity, heterogeneity of the glass beads that we find in central Europe, in northwestern Europe, we have a chance to draw conclusions on agents and intensity of this sort of trade. And this is the broad topic. I hope to produce new results in this forthcoming project that is funded by the Liwa Human Trust. Thank you very much.