The Mother of All Bead Furnaces: Testing a Hypothesis about a Natural Draft Bead Furnace

Abstract

As a part of the ongoing exploration of Viking Era glass bead production, the Dark Ages Re-creation Company (DARC) team perform new pilot experiments on a regular basis. These experiments provide a preliminary understanding of a specific construct or research question, allowing us to judge the validity of further experiments, as well as what equipment or additional questions may be necessary as a part of a related experiment sequence. For a more complete understanding of the archaeological and cultural background to this series of experiments please refer to Peterson, 2017 and Peterson, et al., 2014. For this experiment the DARC team consisted of Darrell Markewitz, Richard Schweitzer, Sarah Backa, the author, and two guests.

Keywords

• furnace
• kiln or oven
• bead
• experiment
• viking age
• canada