Provenance Analysis of Glass Artefacts

Abstract

Different examples, chosen from various historical contexts (from Protohistory to the end of Post Medieval period) and from various geographical areas (France, Europe, the Indian world and the Pacific region) are used to illustrate the information provided by the chemical analysis of ancient glasses for trade and provenance studies. A long time before artificial glass was invented, prehistoric populations were using obsidian, a natural glass, to make tools. We illustrate the importance of trace analysis to understand and to reconstruct the trade and exchange patterns of this material, during Neolithic times. Later, during Bronze Age, artificial glass, as glass beads, was the object of long distance trades. Glass objects, found on French Bronze and Iron Age archaeological sites, are used to show that the relationships, which exist between the chemical composition of the object, their chronology and the production area of the raw material, can be used to build a distribution model of glass. Giving some examples, we show that glass composition could also be used as a relative dating tool, which can help to specify the stratigraphic attribution of an object. Then we illustrate the importance of trace elements determination, to identify the provenance of some of the raw materials used in glass workshops. We then leave the European world to study international glass trade at the beginning of our era. Glass chemical composition is used to study glass trade between the Mediterranean world and the Indian world. Trace elements determination appears to be crucial to identify some glass productions, which have very closed composition but completely different origin. Then, we move back to Europe at the end of the first millennium AD. At this period, glass industry suffers many important mutations. At the beginning of the European glass industry in Carolingian times, we discuss the emergence of some very strange glass recipes: with the help of some complementary methods, such as lead isotopes ratio analysis, we illustrate how it is possible – to identify the birth place of these recipes, – to follow the distribution of the glass products through Europe. Difficulties, to interpret archaeometric data, are illustrated by the study of the production of a 14th century French glass workshop. The great compositional variability encountered for this medieval glass workshop, lying between two different glass types production area, is interpreted in terms of glass recycling or plant ashes mixing. Then, during the Post Medieval period, trade beads will bring us to the small island of Cikobia–i–Ra (northeastern end of the Fiji Islands), where they will be used to point out the internationalisation of glass trade.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 62 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.