Belle's Bells

Another Friday, another set of artifacts.  You'd think we'd be running out, but there's a lot of different types of artifacts on board!

Today I started working on Belle's collection of "flushloop" or "hawk" bells.  These little brass bells are made out of two pieces of metal with a little loop, probably in Holland (remember the map from earlier?).  Inside is an iron clapper, or bead for making them jingle.  Maybe by next week I'll have figured out how to put sound on the blog, and you can hear what one of them sounds like.

Here's one of the ~1300 bells we have.  It's the bottom, and you can see the little soundholes.  You can also see the engraved "bowtie" maker's mark, used to identify the person that made it.  There are several different marks, indicating that the bells were from different manufacturers.  They include this bowtie, a letter "S", and a cat.

As with so many Belle items, we have a lot of bells.  They're in big bags right now, and the goal is to get them retagged, rebagged, and lined up in trays, so that researchers can find them easily.  We also need to make sure any analysis we've done in the past can be linked with individual bells.

They start like this...

Then they're laid out on a table...

Because we're still working on these bells, I don't have pictures of the nice neat trays they're all going.  Next week I'll try to get you some sound from a bell, and also more pictures.

Anything you want to know about them?