A valley in Bosnia, Yugoslavia, containing an estimated 20,000 graves, spanning the 10th to 1st centuries bc, including 25 groups of tumuli. Inhumation was the dominant rite and some graves were very richly equipped. Local sources of gold, silver, copper and iron were exploited, and the communities here were involved in trade with Greece, Italy and the Danube Valley. glass. A mineral material that has been cooled so quickly that a crystal structure has not had time to form. Glasses are brittle and, when broken, fracture along curved lines, to produce shell-like scars and sharp edges. This property of so-called conchoidal fracture was used in antiquity to make sharp tools. Natural glasses, such as obsidian, are rare, but cryptocrystalline materials, with so fine a crystal structure that they behave somewhat like glasses, are relatively common (e.g. flint). Man-made glasses are formed from the heating and fusing of quartz sands, which on rapid cooling take on a glassy texture. Faience beads (and similar objects) which have a fused, glassy surface were made both in Early Dynastic Egypt and Sumer, and true glass was in use in Mesopotamia by the Sargonid (Akkadian) period.
The Macmillan dictionary of archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983Copied