A nearly round glass bead with a representation of female heads. The dark azure background is divided by red lines into diamond-shaped fields in four rows. Some of the fields are filled with a chequered pattern in different colours. The rest contain female heads in the Egyptian style. The bead corresponds to type 370 of group XXIII of Tempelmann-Mączyńska. Similar beads were manufactured in glass workshops in the Black Sea region, from which they reached the region of the Baltic Sea and the North Sea.
Around the mid-1920s nine skeletons of adults and children were accidentally discovered during mining of the marl in the valley of the Parsęta. Presumably some of the graves contained two burials. In one of such graves the following goods were found: two brooches which had been placed to the both sides of the buried person’s neck, a necklace of glass, amber and bone beads at the chest level. The specimen with a representation of female heads was one of them.
Chronology:
the second half of the 3rd century – the first half of the 5th century AD
Museum collection:
the National Museum in Szczecin
by H. Machajewski