The provenance of ancient glass through compositional analysis

Abstract

Recent developments in the understanding of the low-magnesia soda-lime-silica or "natron" glasses of the first millennium A.D. are reviewed. it appears that glass production was divided between a small number of primary glass making centres, situated mainly in the Near East, and a large number of secondary fabrication workshops that remelted and shaped the lumps of raw, premelted glass. Glass may be related to its primary production group by elemental analysis and where there are data from workshops, to the production centre or region. The recycling of old Glass is revealed by trace element analysis, due to the contamination of primary glass compositions by small quantities of coloured glass incorporated in the recycled material. The analysis of isotopes of Sr and Ph allows the geological environment of the raw materials to he inferred and in some cases, provenance to be predicted.

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