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i AbstractThe paper analyses amphoriskos-shaped glass beads from different archaeological contexts. As they re-
flect the complex social networks that connected different worlds, they can be used to interpret broader 
cultural processes – from ancient Macedonia to the Baltic, from the central Balkans to the heart of the 
Pannonian plain. Most importantly, we can use the finds to explain the concept of prestige in the anal-
ysis of material culture and to reconstruct the intercultural character of social elites, which created and 
sustained long-distance trade networks.
Key words: amphoriskos-shaped glass beads, long-distance trade, Early Iron Age, Late Iron Age
Izvleček
Prispevek analizira steklene jagode v obliki amforiskov iz različnih arheoloških kontekstov. Uporablja-
jo se za interpretacijo širših kulturnih procesov, saj odsevajo kompleksne družbene mreže, ki so pove-
zovale različne svetove – od antične Makedonije do Baltika, od osrednjega Balkana do osrčja Panonske 
nižine. Najpomembneje pa je, da se najdbe lahko uporabijo za razlago koncepta prestiža v analizah ma-
terialne kulture in za rekonstrukcijo medkulturnega značaja družbenih elit, ki so ustvarile in vzdrževa-
le trgovske mreže na dolge razdalje.
Ključne besede: steklene jagode v obliki amforiska, trgovina na dolge razdalje, starejša železna doba, 
mlajša železna doba
We’re same colours, and we’re different breeds …
Smo iste barve in smo različnih vrst ...
Boris Kavur
University of Primorska, Faculty of Humanities, Slovenia 
boris.kavur@upr.si
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Introduction
Europe presently is, and was in the past, a continent with many interacting regions. While some aspects, such as the relation-
ship between Mediterranean cultures and Early 
and Late Iron Age cultural regions, for example, 
have been addressed many times, other inter-re-
gional relationships have been neglected – es-
pecially those transgressing the Early/Late Iron 
Age cultural and chronological borders. Particu-
larly since numerous authors claimed that the 
Balkans and the Eastern Adriatic coast were just 
the periphery of the more developed and wealthy 
Greek world (especially in the 5th and 4th centu-
ry BCE these were Archaea Macedonia and Syr-
acuse on Sicily) and the contacts of these regions 
with their hinterlands were based on purely eco-
nomic relations. 
A mosaic of different prehistoric communi-
ties surrounded the Adriatic in the 4th century 
BCE. Each one of them possessed a limited ter-
ritory and several fortified proto-urban centres 
controlled secondary urban agglomerations and 
spoke most probably a distinct language. While 
in the southeastern Alps and along the river Sava 
there were the last communities persisting in the 
last cultural manifestations of the Early Iron 
ht t ps://doi .org /10 . 264 93/2350 -54 43.10 (1)13-22 © aut hor/aut hors
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Age, further to the north, in the Pannonian Ba-
sin, there were the communities we describe to-
day as the Celts. Carriers of technological and 
stylistic innovations broadly described as the 
Late Iron Age – and despite their cultural var-
iability, they unified in numerous stylistic and 
technological aspects a large part of central, east-
ern and western Europe. The writers of antiqui-
ty, referring to these communities, used differ-
ent ethnonyms in describing them. They were 
subtly imposing that the lack of urbanization 
and political organization witnessed that they 
still did not reach the level of civilization of the 
people surrounding the Mediterranean. Not re-
ducing the arguments to the dichotomy and di-
visions between the civilized in the barbarians, 
the authors used an array of subtle gradients 
to introduce them into the world of antiquity. 
These communities entered the Mediterranean 
world and made their debut in history especial-
ly at the end of the 5th and beginning of 4th cen-
tury BCE during the great shifts of power when 
ancient Macedonia and Sicilian Syracuse includ-
ed them into their economic networks and co-
lonial ambitions – in the Greek narratives they 
were transformed from mythological into his-
torical neighbours. As a result, their relation-
ships shifted from being mythological to being 
economic and military, especially the last nar-
rative dominated by Celtic migrations and in-
vasions as well as the inclusion of Celtic merce-
naries in power struggles among Mediterranean 
centres of power.
In the last century archaeology was desper-
ate to provide the material evidence for several 
processes known form history on one and to syn-
chronize the existing archaeological data with 
historical sources on the other side. Of course, 
the tracing of prehistoric weaponry in the Med-
iterranean (Kavur and Blečić Kavur 2014) and 
of luxury bronze vessels in central and eastern 
Europe (Blečić Kavur and Kavur 2010) seemed 
the easiest solution since it was interpreted as the 
mobility of warriors and as flow of diplomatic 
gifts connecting social elites on both sides. It was 
a major departure from the decades-old fascina-
tion with the historical events such as the Celtic 
raid towards Delphi, which dominated the nar-
rative (Schönfelder 2007; cf. Szabó 1991). Slow-
ly the focus started to move to processes pre-
dating the historical events, economic, cultural 
and religious contacts linking the Mediterrane-
an and central Europe before the age of Celtic 
military invasions (Verger 2003). Beside the fo-
cus on massive imports such as pottery and am-
phorae, as well as important items, such a bronze 
vessel, clearly illustrating the networks of con-
tacts between social elites, the focus shifted to-
wards the circulation of assumable less practi-
cal and ideologically invested items – jewellery, 
trinkets produced in workshops of ancient Mac-
edonia and Great Greece. Among them the most 
prominent, basically due to their large numbers, 
wide distribution and numerous culturally dif-
ferent contexts of discovery, role is played by sim-
ple amphoriskos-shaped glass pendants (Rustoiu 
2015; Blečić Kavur and Kavur 2016; Kavur 2019).
Perhaps the oldest known archaeological 
discovery, chronologically and from the litera-
ture, predating the arrival of the Eastern Celts 
to the southern part of the Pannonian Basin, 
but clearly indicating the circulation of prestig-
ious items of material culture was unfortunate-
ly also mostly ignored. Already in 1902 pub-
lished assemblage from Sremska Mitrovica, most 
probably the remains of a single burial, includ-
ed three fibulae and two bracelets made from 
silver, 74 amber beads, 61 coral beads, 262 am-
phoriskos-shaped glass pendants, a single mel-
on-shaped glass bead, two elongated black glass 
beads and, most importantly, the remains of a 
bronze cup (Brunšmid 1902, 80). Although frag-
mented, the remains could be reconstructed as a 
cup with everted rim, low foot and two handles. 
Similar finds were in the assemblages from the 
Athenian Agora dated to the end of the 5th cen-
tury BCE (Vocotopoulou 1975, 761–764). To-
day, among the most important finds from this 
context are the amphoriskos-shaped glass beads, 
numerous times discussed in the scientific lit-
erature. They were discovered in numerous dif-
ferent cultural contexts demonstrating the en-
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tanglement of past societies today interpreted 
in different cultural and chronological contexts 
and systems.
During the last few decades, new interpre-
tations, based on concepts of entanglement, ac-
ceptance, and rejection, have enabled modern 
understanding of specific items of Mediterrane-
an material culture in prehistoric Iron Age con-
texts. They contributed to our understanding of 
the intercultural nature of the world but focused 
predominantly on valuables such as vessels dis-
playing the prestigious economic status of exclu-
Figure 1: Necklace composed from glass beads from Sremska Mitrovica (photo: Boris Kavur).
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sively symbolic significance, such as situlae, cups, 
and rhyta. They were discussed presenting their 
typological and stylistic determination and pro-
posing their most probable place of production – 
illustrating the processes of their distributions as 
indicators of mostly political ambitions. On the 
other hand, they were also describing the accul-
turations of indigenous elites accepting and ma-
nipulating these items.
By studying the material culture, new ar-
chaeological interpretations have altered the 
discourse on Mediterranean (cultural) coloni-
alism by promoting concepts of identity and en-
tanglement, acceptance and rejection, acquies-
cence, and resistance. This process significantly 
enriched our understanding of the intercultur-
al character of the world in the 5th and 4th cen-
turies BCE. Thus archaeology, for decades em-
bedded in the historical narratives, became an 
even more culturally sensitive and anthropo-
logically relevant endeavour. Modern studies 
focusing on culture contact (and culture redis-
tribution) studies have transformed the archae-
ology of Mediterranean trade into a discipline 
with transdisciplinary relevance. A widespread 
critical consciousness about indigenous cultural 
practices (and material culture production and 
consumption) surfaced during this (fashion-
able) rise of multiculturalism. A leap was made 
from just talking about things and their physi-
cal properties to dealing with societies in terms 
of abstract processes of ideological manipulation 
with material culture.
Discussion
Many papers and authors have discussed am-
phoriskos-shaped glass beads in the past two 
decades from a variety of perspectives, but it was 
only recently that chemical analyses of the glass 
contributed to the understanding of their pro-
duction and origins.
Petar Popović presented the first major 
publication of them, focusing on finds from 
the Adriatic and particularly the Central Bal-
kan region. He identified the workshops in an-
cient Macedonia as the most probable places of 
their production and noted that despite the pres-
ence of multiple finds in Celtic graves, their pro-
duction and circulation ceased with the Celt-
ic invasion to the south (Popović 1997; Popović 
2000, 274–275). On the other side, Stefania Vel-
lani presented an overview of their presence on 
the western Adriatic coast and its hinterland. 
Demonstrating that a modest amount of such 
finds was known in the 4th century BCE gen-
erally in northern Italy, the most southern find 
came from a female burial in the hypogeum in 
Via Molise in Canosa di Puglia where, amongst 
others, 99 beads were discovered (Vellani 2000, 
42–45, Fig. 1). 
A few years later, Martin Schönfelder in-
cluded them into a broader historical picture 
illuminating their distribution because of the 
Celtic unsuccessful raid towards Delphi. He as-
sumed that their distribution could explain their 
origins in mainly Greece but perhaps even Italy 
(Schönfelder 2007, 308–309). Building upon the 
critique of his approach and new data present-
ed, Aurel Rustoiu demonstrated a much more 
complex situation with numerous previously un-
charted finds (Rustoiu 2008, 52–57). Later he 
elaborated his position by dividing their distri-
bution into western and eastern areas, where the 
western one was further sub-divided into four 
zones (Rustoiu 2015, 367, Fig. 3). His innovative 
interpretation proposed that the distribution 
of amphoriskos-shaped glass beads should be 
viewed in the context of economic and intercom-
munity connections across wide areas and since 
most of them were discovered in female burials, 
he assumed that exogamy played an important 
role in their circulation (Rustoiu 2015, 370–373). 
Vera Bitrakova Grozdanova focusing on their 
southern distribution presented that Macedoni-
an workshops developed the art of production of 
light transparent glass in the 4th century BCE 
and concluded that they were their producer (Bi-
trakova Grozdanova 2011, 171). 
In the latest publications on the distribu-
tion of amphoriskos-shaped glass beads, Marti-
na Blečić Kavur and Boris Kavur acknowledged 
the previous discussions about the Danubian 
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corridor but focused on the importance of east-
ern Adriatic trade routes and regional distribu-
tion centres. Based on the association between 
Macedonian production, the dissemination of 
such finds in Slovenia, and the large concentra-
tion found in central Transdanubia, they con-
cluded that amphoriskos-shaped glass beads 
were the most numerous, but not the only ele-
ment found along these pathways (Blečić Kavur 
and Kavur 2017; Kavur 2019). Such a position 
was accepted by Attila Horváth, who discovered 
more than 500 examples on the Celtic cemetery 
at Csepel Island in Budapest, where beside dif-
ferent forms of glass beads, also corals and finger 
rings coming from the Mediterranean were dis-
covered in female graves (Horváth 2017).
According to the widespread distribution 
of amphoriskos-shaped glass beads along the 
Adriatic coast and southeastern Europe, we can 
conclude that most of them were discovered in 
regional settlement centres, which served as im-
portant links in chains of long-distance trade 
and cultural connections, acting as distribution 
and redistribution centres for prestige items. 
They were points in a network of interlinked 
centres of power and trade, in which the redis-
tribution and circulation of exotic prestigious 
goods created individuals accentuating their sta-
tus and position with the creation of a cosmo-
politan fashion in which the Macedonian prod-
ucts played an important role.
In the necropolis of the Celtic World, those 
beads were discovered in female graves demon-
strating a higher status of the deceased. Such 
assemblages were created to clearly exhibit the 
economic abilities of their owners to enter and 
perform a crucial role in the long-distance trade 
with prestigious items. In grave context, from 
Slovenia to Hungary and beyond, glass am-
phoriskos-shaped glass beads were discovered in 
graves not only displaying opulent grave inven-
tories, such as grave number 247 from Csepel Is-
land (Horváth 2017), but graves which displayed 
multiple cultural origins of the grave goods such 
as the grave number 37 from tumulus VII on Ka-
piteljska njiva in Novo mesto where in a modest-
ly equipped female grave an amphoriskos-shaped 
glass bead was discovered together with a fibula 
of Eastern Celtic origin, regional bracelets and 
ankle ring as well as glass beads (Križ, Stipančić 
and Škedelj Petrič 2009, 318, 8.5.5, 320, 8.5.27). By 
creating such inventories, they substituted their 
expressions of identity with symbols of their sta-
tus, with prestigious items acting as an intercul-
tural composition of their attire. These burials 
included items originating from different sourc-
es and cultural backgrounds, indicating that 
these glass beads were one of the important el-
Figure 2: Necklace with two amphoriskos-shaped glass beads and a golden lion-shaped pendant from grave 150 
at the necropolis Golem Grad on Lake Prespa (Bitrakova Grozdanova 2011, 168).
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ements of “cosmopolitan fashion” consumed by 
individuals desiring to accentuate their social 
status.
A diffused distribution pattern was most 
probably the result of a system of gift exchang-
es that accelerated the flow between the vague-
ly geographically defined areas from which one 
was considered a source of prestige and power. 
Peer-polity interaction and competition stim-
ulated the elites to emulate the consumption 
and display creating several archaeological re-
cords. Although trinkets – are hardly recogniz-
able outside of close personal interactions, with 
their visual idioms, they were perceived as ex-
otic, and their iconography and raw materials 
were dramatically different. Small and worn on 
the body they were not as dramatically exotic as 
bronze vessels – their semantic message was not 
directed to a broad audience present on feasting 
and/or burial rites but limited, individual and 
Figure 3: Necklace composed from glass beads from Přítluky, Moravia (photo B. Kavur).
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personal. They were prestigious, although they 
were not on public display – their recognition 
required personal closeness and admittance into 
a restricted social circle. Only members of social 
elites were able to understand activities involv-
ing the procurement and redistribution of them 
as well as the symbolically codified identity of 
the possessor and his or her role within the so-
ciety. They mediated this information through 
culturally constructed activities that included 
the formation of obligational relations between 
participants in the long-distance trade networks 
(Blečić Kavur and Kavur 2016, 250–252). These 
beads were holders of information about the so-
cial connections of the owner, their relational 
identities and their social status or statuses in the 
region. Moreover, it is through the known biog-
raphy of the artefacts owned, and their history of 
circulation that they became links between peo-
ple, objects and places creating the enchainment 
between them (Tilley 1999; Knappett 2011). El-
evated into cultural icons, enabling people to 
identify strongly with them and to rely on these 
symbols as carriers of information in their every-
day lives.
Conclusion
Cosmopolitanism commenced its life as a pro-
ject of participation in which commons exceed-
ed the boundaries of their communal specifici-
ty and were aspiring to embrace the world as a 
shared sphere. They were not only replicating 
their cultural and aesthetic uniformity but or-
ganized diversity, the latter being the reflec-
tion of an increasing interconnectedness of var-
ied local cultures. Ad it was the long-distance 
trade and interconnectedness of regional com-
munities that developed cultural characteris-
tics without a clear anchorage in any one terri-
tory, without a clear pattern of consumption. 
Amphoriskos-shaped glass beads were trinkets 
transgressing cultural boundaries, interpreted, 
and reinterpreted in different contexts, creating 
a diversity of practices of their manipulations, 
and a multitude of appropriations by local com-
munities. Flowing across the cultural borders 
and linking central and southeastern Europe 
into a network connected with similar symbol-
ic perceptions and desires for translucent pres-
tigious jewellery. Trinkets were defined as small 
objects of clearly foreign origin produced from 
relatively inexpensive materials. They were not 
locally produced, and not even imitated, small 
enough to be worn around the neck but their 
details were only discernible from up close. Its’ 
form and the material used reinforced its other-
ness and rendered it manifestly non-local – the 
object’s distant origin was essential to its onto-
logical status and meaning within the society. It 
was minor exotica somewhat wondrous and un-
usual but somewhat cheap, small but still consid-
ered prestigious (Arrington 2016, 2–3).
Despite their small size, they were consid-
ered items of prestige due to their materiality 
and distant origin. And prestige was the main 
asset in the premodern world of the 5th and 4th 
century BCE – not only reduced to the material 
manifestation in terms of artefacts but also, and 
even more intensively in the terms of symbolic 
capital which could have been converted easily in 
other forms of capital. The great imperial super-
powers of that period, the Macedonian state on 
one and the Sicilian Syracuse on the other side, 
were increasing their prestige on the peripheries 
through direct and indirect promotion. A con-
stant flow of artefacts, interpreted as symbolic, 
has crossed the economic and political bound-
aries of empires connected to world economies 
defined by market trade and their marginal re-
gions where redistribution took place linked to 
territories embedded in subsistence economies 
lacking the mechanisms of wider integration. 
The reception of the Mediterranean im-
ports in prehistoric contexts remains substan-
tially incomplete without an understanding of 
these prehistoric communities. The presence of 
imports, impeded considerations of the sites in 
their regional contexts as loci of cultural inter-
actions. The places and mechanisms of origin 
of these items remain in the narrative as cultur-
al fantasies, and the hinterland of the Northern 
Adriatic acts as an interstitial location, a “non-
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place” between the Mediterranean and prehis-
toric times. 
Within all these relations, amphoriskos- 
-shaped glass beads served as society’s founda-
tional compass points – as anchors of meaning 
continually referenced in the reproduction of so-
cial relations and social roles. In addition, it was 
the similarity of social relations and social roles 
that connected different communities, basically 
different only due to their material culture. They 
were representative symbols considered wor-
thy admirations that people accept as a short-
hand to represent important ideas that were 
otherwise gradually diffused through oral sto-
rytelling traditions, common rituals and other 
means of ideological reproduction. The crux of 
their iconicity was that they were widely regard-
ed as the most compelling symbol of a set of ide-
as or values that the societies deemed important 
(Holt 2004, 1–20). Ideas that actually changed 
along the long way of the distribution of the am-
phoriskos-shaped beads, demonstrating the cos-
mopolitanism of the prehistoric communities 
from the Aegean and Adriatic all the way to cen-
tral-eastern Europe.
Summary
For most of the twentieth century, historiography and 
archaeology justified the great divide between the an-
cient civilizations of the Mediterranean and the cul-
tures of prehistoric Europe. Traditionally, the contacts 
were interpreted as military conflicts and the archaeo-
logical finds that crossed the borders on one side, and 
the other, were interpreted as objects related to these 
rare contacts of social elites - as military booty or as dip-
lomatic gifts.
In recent decades, especially the archaeological inter-
pretation of the processes of cultural and economic 
flows and social dynamics at the places of contact has 
begun to change radically. Analyses of the finds and the 
contexts of their discoveries on both sides showed that 
the contacts between the Mediterranean and Europe, 
based primarily on economic, as well as entirely on re-
ligious processes, were a historical constant and not an 
exception. Above all, it was shown that the flows of in-
dividual objects passed between centres of the redis-
tribution for which we assumed culturally completely 
different contexts in our archaeological constructions. 
Long-distance trade with objects originating from the 
workshops of Great Greece and Ancient Macedonia 
connected communities on the periphery of the Med-
iterranean world, and the shores of the Adriatic with 
communities in their hinterland and further on the con-
tinent – communities that experienced the end of the 
Early, or they already formed, culturally, technological-
ly and aesthetically the beginning of the Late Iron Age.
There are a number of items that mark long-distance 
trade, including glass pendants in the form of am-
phoriskos-shaped glass beads – jewellery trinkets made 
of monochrome blue glass and especially transparent 
glass, which represented the latest technological inno-
vations of Macedonian workshops. The distribution 
of these objects along the Adriatic shore, through the 
central Balkans, and beyond the Black Sea to Panno-
nia enables reconstruction of the networks of contacts 
and, above all, the interpretations, and reinterpretations 
of the fashion of wearing them in different prehistoric 
communities. They show us the cosmopolitan spirit of 
the prehistoric communities of Europe – the economic 
relations of individuals and communities to exotic im-
ports, their inclusion in local aesthetics and, above all, 
the interpretation and reinterpretation of exotic ob-
jects from the Mediterranean workshops that connect-
ed prehistoric Europe.
Povzetek
Večji del dvajsetega stoletja sta zgodovinopisje in arheo-
logija utemeljevala veliki razkol med antičnimi civiliza-
cijami Sredozemlja ter kulturami prazgodovinske Evro-
pe. Tradicionalno so bili stiki interpretirani kot vojaški 
konflikti. Arheološke najdbe, ki pa so prehajale meje na 
eni in drugi strani pa so bile interpretirane kot predmeti 
povezanimi s temi redkimi stiki družbenih elit – kot vo-
jaški plen oziroma kot diplomatska darila.
V zadnjih desetletjih se je predvsem arheološka inter-
pretacija procesov kulturnih in ekonomskih tokov ter 
družbenih dinamik na prostorih stikov začela radikalno 
spreminjati. Analize najdb in kontekstov njihovih od-
kritij na obeh straneh so pokazale, da so predvsem eko-
nomski, kot tudi na popolnoma religioznih procesih 
utemeljeni stiki med Sredozemljem in Evropo, bili zgo-
dovinska stalnica ter ne izjema. Predvsem pa se je poka-
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zalo, da so tokovi posameznih predmetov prehajali med 
centri redistribucije za katere smo v naših arheoloških 
konstrukcijah predvidevali kulturno povsem drugačne 
kontekste. Pokazalo se je, da je trgovina na dolge razda-
lje s predmeti, ki so izvirali iz delavnic Velike Grčije in 
Antične Makedonije povezovala skupnosti na obrobju 
sredozemskega sveta in na obalah Jadrana s skupnostmi 
v njihovem zaledju ter dalje na celini – skupnostmi, ki 
so preživljale konec starejše oziroma so že kulturno, teh-
nološko in estetsko tvorile začetek mlajše železne dobe.
Med predmeti, ki so zaznamovali trgovino na dolge raz-
dalje moramo vsekakor izpostaviti male steklene obeske 
v obliki amforiskov – nakitne drobnarije iz enobarvnega 
modrega, predvsem pa prosojnega stekla, ki so predstav-
ljale zadnje tehnološke inovacije makedonskih delavnic 
na področju steklarstva. Opazujoč njihovo distribucijo 
po obalah Jadrana, preko centralnega Balkana in onkraj 
obal Črnega morja na prostor Panonije ter dalje, lahko 
rekonstruiramo omrežja stikov predvsem pa interpre-
tacije in reinterpretacije mode njihovega nošenja v raz-
ličnih skupnostih prazgodovinske Evrope. Prikazujejo 
nam kozmopolitski duh prazgodovinskih skupnosti – 
ekonomske odnose posameznikov in skupnosti do ek-
sotičnih importov, njihovo vključitev v lokalno estetiko 
ter predvsem interpretacijo in reinterpretacijo eksotič-
nih predmetov iz sredozemskih delavnic, ki so povezo-
vali prazgodovinsko Evropo.
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