I managed to fix the OCR issues of my scanning program and just managed to brute transcribe and translate the most important pages and yes! Some new and really exciting information but also support for what I have found in terms of gaps and assumptions.

It’s so important when you are working in a niche field to be able to include the work of scholars who came before you because it gives weight to your interpretations and means those scholars are credited.

In this case the book is out of print and only available in a few libraries and of course is in German. So it makes it even more important to be able to link to this work, as the author used the same older sources as me, and a few more and cautions the interpretations of some of them. And some of the questions I had were directly linked to those interpretations. They also tended to gloss over the role of women.

So now I have a bit of confirmation as to a couple of reasons I’m just not finding the work I need.

By coincidence someone shared an extant item and an interpretation of it and while it’s too early for direct evidence, it’s also evidence of a craft that I can find visual evidence of. Oh, and I just realised I might also have spotted some evidence of the kind of decoration used. Okay I need to write this down in my notebook to make sure I don’t forget.