An Encyclopaedia of Indian Archaeology v1.c15.s1.19

v1.c15.s1.19

Quite a large variety is found in the method of decorating beads. The decorations comprise carving, etching, tinting, cementing, inlaying, composing and glazing. All these are found in Indian beads of different periods. Evidence for glazing is not available prior to the Christian era. The glaze, at many of sites in India, is by nature a composition of a vitreous substance or frit. The heating of beads with a view to obtaining deeper colours has already been referred to. The antiquity of this process goes back to the period of the Harappa culture. Cementing is a process in which two different kinds of materials are brought together with a flux of adhesive. At Mohenjo-daro beads composed of pink and white slices of limestone have been cemented together to form one bead. In another type of cementing only a portion of the entire surface is covered with small patches of contrasting material cemented at intervals with small patches of contrasting material joined at intervals or in saucered layer. The ‘eye beads’ are the best examples of cemented beads. The earliest specimen of the cemented variety of eye beads is available from the Mauryan levels at Taxila. They have a wide distribution in India both in time and space. Inlaying of beads is a process in which a cavity or depression in the fabric of a bead is filled in by a foreign matter flush with the surface by appropriately shaped pieces. The earliest specimens of such inlaid beads are known from Mohenjo-daro and LOTHAL, but this practice seems to have died out after the initial centuries of the Christian era. Etching was a special process of decoration and seems to have been in vogue in India right from the times of the Harappa culture till the early medieval period. Beads were etched by a process of heating them and by drawing decorative patterns directly on the surface of the beads. (These three processes have been referred to earlier.) Beads with a white pattern on natural stone have been reported from the Harappa as well as Gupta sites, whereas those flooded with white over which black patterns are effected are known from the Harappa sites and continue till about the 3rd century A.D. but are absent at the Megalithic [4.17] sites. Beads with black patterns directly etched on the surface are extremely rare.