The Roman glass revolution, typically characterised by the adoption of the blowpipe, was preceded by a significant expansion in the production of glass bowls made by slumping in the Hellenistic period. Mosaic vessels, made of brightly coloured glass in complex patterns represent the most sophisticated expression of this technique. One hundred and one polychrome glass objects dating to the first centuries BCE and CE and including 65 mosaic glass bowls were analysed for 58 elements using Laser Ablation Inductively-Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). Multivariate statistical analysis of the compositions of 443 individual coloured glasses identified three groups. Groups 1a and 1b are closely related and are relatively rich in TiO2, ZrO2, HfO2, Nb2O3, and ThO2, attributable to origins in Egypt, while Group 2 is rich in Al2O3 and REE and consistent with an origin on the Levantine coast. Mosaic plaques and vessels found in Egypt were made almost exclusively of Egyptian glass. Vessels acquired elsewhere, probably Italy, were either made of only Egyptian glass, of only Levantine glass, or combined glass from both regions in a single object. Given the low abundance of Levantine glass in the Egyptian objects, and the scarcity of mosaic glass excavated in the Levant, the vessels containing glass from both sources and those made in only Levantine glass are likely to have been made in a third region. Thus the compositional data support the view that early Roman slumped mosaic bowls were predominately manufactured outside the eastern Mediterranean, probably in Italy.

This paper establishes criteria for identifying wood ash tempering in archaeological ceramics, a practice documented ethnographically across the globe but likely often unrecognised in archaeological studies due to the lack of established diagnostic markers. Through an experimental project employing a multi-analytical approach, this study identifies key indicators of ash tempering, highlighting the utility of thin section petrography for low-fired ceramics and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis for high-fired ceramics as particularly effective techniques. Finally, we present two archaeological case studies in which the application of our findings has enabled the identification of likely wood ash tempering.Recognising this practice is essential, as its absence in archaeological interpretations may result in missed opportunities to understand past craftspeople and technological traditions. Furthermore, the identification of wood ash tempering offers insights into cross-craft interactions and the potential application of circular economic principles, given the frequent use of waste ashes from other industries in ethnographic examples. By refining methods to detect ash tempering, this research contributes to broader discussions on sustainability, resource reuse, and technological innovation in the past.

Sixty-six glass vessels from excavations in Beirut and dated first century B.C.E. to the first century C.E. have been analysed by electron microprobe. The majority are relatively high in Al2O3, CaO and P2O5, are weakly coloured, manganese-colourless, or yellow–brown-amber and on compositional grounds the glass material is considered to have originated in the Levant. Manganese oxide was added as a decolouriser and MnO contents are continuous between 0.02 and 2.0

Ifriqiya (roughly Tunisia and eastern Algeria) is believed to have played a significant role in the diffusion of ceramic glazed technologies into other regions of the Western Mediterranean. However, due to limited analysis on North African glazed ceramics, its role in technology transfer remains poorly understood. This paper uses SEM–EDS and petrographic analyses to understand the technology employed in the production of Tunisian ceramics through the study of 30 polychrome glazed ceramics from a medieval settlement at the site of Chimtou (ancient Simitthus), Tunisia, dated to the late ninth-twelfth century. The results show that these are lead-rich glazes with varying contents of alkalis, coloured with copper, iron and manganese oxide and applied over a calcareous body. Opaque glazes were obtained using cassiterite crystals as opacifier or by adding crushed quartz. The use of lead stannate as a colourant and opacifier in one light yellow glaze raises questions about the mechanisms of introduction of tin opacification technology in North Africa. Scrap metal seems to have been used as a source of lead for the glazes; while iron slag was probably used as a source of iron to colour the glaze in one sample, pointing to a cross-craft interaction between glazemaking and metallurgy.

Material recovered from the Ma'agan Mikhael B shipwreck, off the coast of northern Israel, includes a significant assemblage of glass, which appears to represent waste workshop material (cullet) collected for recycling. Twenty-three samples were selected for analysis for major and minor elements using SEM-EDS, to provide insight into the activities and dating of the ship. The glass corresponds to known primary glass types, comprising a high- and a low-lime subgroup of Levantine 1 (Apollonia type), and Egypt 1b. The assemblage is likely to date to the early part of the eighth century CE and, in conjunction with the radiocarbon dating of the ship, gives a possible date range for the wreck of 710-740 C.E. All groups contain glass-working waste, glass chunks, and vessel fragments, and the majority are likely to have been collected from one or more workshops. It is unclear whether this cargo represents the byproducts of several campaigns of a single workshop which used different consignments of raw glass, or material from different workshops, collected at different ports of call.

Following an initial micro-XRF assay, 42 samples of glass from the twentieth-century excavations of the fourthcentury CE production site at Jalame, Israel, were selected and analysed by EPMA, with subsets for trace elements by LA-ICP-MS (n=29 samples) and for Hf isotopes by MC-ICP-MS (n=6). Comparison of major elements for ten samples originally measured in Brill (1988) was good, although the earlier SiO2 values are slightly high. Analyses of furnace debris and contaminated glass imply that glass furnaces were made of, or lined with a limerich material, leading to contamination by CaO, rather than Al2O3. This confirms that higher alumina contents measured for Jalame glass relative to Roman Mn-decolourised glass of first-third century Europe are significant and it is suggested that the source of the earlier Roman glass lies further North on the eastern Mediterranean coast. A wide range of trace elements are shown to have entered the glass with the addition of manganese, so caution should be exercised when interpreting trace element and isotopic data on glass with significant amounts of Mn, although the effects on REE and some of the lithophiles most often used in provenancing appear minor or insignificant in Jalame glass with MnO below 1.3 wt%. For example, the hafnium isotope composition of the Jalame material does not appear to have been significantly affected and falls within the previously determined Levantine range, distinguishable from Egyptian glass. Associated trace elements indicate that two Mn sources were exploited and this raises the possibility of further investigation of Mn sources in early glass production. The wide range of added manganese suggests problems in obtaining a homogeneous batch and it is suggested that (a) a single initially inhomogeneous furnace load melted to a range of colours, which were subsequently coloursorted as chunks, and/or (b) the recycling of poorly fused manganese-decolourised glass into later manganesefree batches resulted in the observed variation. The cobalt pigment used was the high-nickel late antique type and allows the introduction of this source to be pushed back from the sixth to the fourth century CE. The use of antimony in glassmaking ceased at around the same time, and it is speculated that these changes were related.

HUNT, TERRY L. 1989 Lapita Ceramic Exchange in the Mussau Islands, Papua New Guinea. Unpub. Ph.D. diss. Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle. KIRCH, PATRICK VINTON, ED. 2001 Lapita and Its Transformations in Near Oceania: Archaeological Investigations in the Mussau Islands, Papua New Guinea. University of California Archaeological Research Facility Contribution No. 59. Berkeley: University of California.

Japanese craftspeople have dominated the art of patinating copper-alloys since the 15th century, using precise alloy compositions and complicated patination processes in different hot solutions to create a variety of colours on swords fittings such as tsuba. While this complex tradition is increasingly popular in the East, the reasons behind the choices made by craftspeople in the selection of the components of the alloys and are still not fully understood. This paper investigates the effect of different alloying elements (tin, gold, and silver) on the resulting patina. Experimental results are compared with optical and compositional analyses on historical Japanese artefacts, confirming the effects of the different alloying elements on the patina characteristics and colour. The absence of tin and the presence of gold limit the growth of an oxide layer and promote the formation of a thin patina characterised by a smooth appearance without visible grains. Therefore, a limited thickness of the patinas is a key aspect for the production of the desired colour and appearance of the patinas. The first colorimetric analysis on historical Japanese artefacts demonstrates the influence of gold, silver and tin in the final patina colour, validating the observations in the experimental replicas.

New elemental data confirm the proposal by Ceglia et al. (2015) of two sub- groups of high iron, manganese and titanium glass, HIMTa and HIMTb, differing in their ratios Fe2O3/ TiO2 and Fe2O3/ Al2O3. Neodymium and strontium isotopes are consistent with south- eastern Mediterranean coastal sand for both groups, allowing for an identifia-ble strontium contribution from the added manganese. Trace elements are consistent with an Egyptian origin, although a marked Eu anomaly in HIMTa is correlated with Ba, again added with manganese. Strong within- group correlations between manganese and iron oxides are not easily explained either as deliberate additions of manganese decol-ouriser or as a characteristic of the glass- making sand. Instead, HIMT glass is considered to have been deliberately tinted yellow- green by the primary glass makers to distinguish it from the green- blue glass of the Levant. The colour branding of the raw glass allowed glass workers to distinguish sodium- rich Egyptian HIMT glass from the more viscous, high working temperature Levantine glass, thereby offering savings in marginal costs, such as those relating to fuel.

The first analyses of high-fired white wares from a newly discovered Sui to early Tang dynasty workshop site at Yiyongjie, Luoyang, are presented. SEM-EDS indicates that the Luoyang products were less vitrified than those of more famous porcelain making kilns such as Xing and Anyang but the discovery of identical wares in residential areas of the city and burials indicates that they fulfilled the needs of consumers at the time. One production group is characterised by the addition of crushed quartz to whiten the body, while the addition of feldspathic material to the glazes appears to have been common. A group of wares for which there is no production evidence shows very low phosphate concentrations in some of the glazes, consistent with recent suggestions that some early northern porcelain glazes were fluxed with a mixture of vegetal ash and limestone. The new data provide important evidence for the nature of the transition from celadon to porcelain production in the North. They suggest that an experimental approach was deliberately adopted in kilns across the region and was not confined to those kilns which later emerged as the most successful. They emphasise the need for a focus beyond the major kilns if the nature of ceramic innovation in the period is to be fully understood.

Asian Perspectives, Vol. 62, No. 2 © 2023 by the University of Hawai‘i Press. Ancient Glass of South Asia: Archaeology, Ethnography and Global Connections. Alok Kumar Kanungo and Laure Dussubieux, eds. Singapore: Springer, 2021. xxvi + 557 pp., 59 b&w + 245 colour illustrations. Hardcover US$160, ISBN: 9789811636554; softcover US$140, ISBN: 9789811636578; ebook US$109, ISBN: 9789811636561. Reviewed by Ian C. FREESTONE, UCL Institute of Archaeology The marked expansion in the archaeometry of glass which took place in the first decade of the twenty-first century has led to an explosion of interest in glass beads and bangles. Desirable, robust, and portable, they hold important information on trade and connectivity which can be revealed by the analysis of their chemical constituents. While this potential of chemical analysis has been understood for decades (e.g., Basa et al. 1991; Brill 1987; Singh 1989), it is only recently that it has been fully realized, largely due to the application of the technique of laser ablation inductivelycoupled mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). This method allows a rapid, accurate, and precise analysis of around 60 elements in glass artifacts and, critically, is essentially non-destructive, leaving only a sub-millimetre scar on the surface of the artifact. Where earlier typological work inferred likely longdistance connections (Francis 1990), chemistry has confirmed them. The resultant growth in understanding has served to emphasise the important role of the Indian sub-continent, which was arguably the major producer of glass beads in the last two millennia. Indian beads are found as far afield as eastern Africa and northwestern Europe and are also widely distributed in southeastern and southern Asia. Furthermore, the continuation into the modern period of traditional methods of making and working with glass and glazes allows important insights into the methods and organization of the production of glass ornaments through ethnographic observation and literary accounts. The present book brings together recent and ongoing work on the archaeology, archaeometry, and ethnoarchaeology of South Asian glass, edited by two leading researchers in their respective areas. The chapters are developed from lectures delivered by the eminent list of authors at a conference in Gandhinagar in 2019 and may be considered a good reflection of the state of the art. However, this substantial 550-page book is far from a standard conference volume. It strives not only to provide a comprehensive coverage of its subject matter, but also to serve as an introduction to the study of glass by including a number of chapters by established researchers on broader issues; by and large, it is very successful. The book opens with several chapters providing introductory and background information. Rehren opens with a summary of the current state of play in our understanding of the origins of glass in Egypt and Mesopotamia. In the context of the present volume, Rehren’s chapter in particular brings home how important the analysis of glass and manufacturing debris from Late Bronze Age production sites has been to current understanding, although at present evidence from production sites in South Asia is largely lacking. The following chapter by Gratuze, Schibille, and Pactat covers the radical changes in glassmaking technology that occurred in Europe and West Asia in the later first millennium C.E., in particular the transition from the use of soda from the natron lakes of Egypt to soda obtained from the ashes of halophytic plants. Not only is this an outstanding example of the application of chemical analysis to a technical change, focusing on chronological and regional variations, but it also provides a good introduction to the major glass types which moved along the silk road from West to East and which are encountered later on in the volume. Kenoyer provides a long, comprehensive review of major importance on the faience and glazed steatite of the Indus tradition, focusing on Harappa. This brings together new work and insights with a substantial but dispersed literature, much of which has been generated by the author Early online release of article in press. and his collaborators and which is not always easily accessible. Kenoyer is skeptical about the identification of so-called “steatite faience” or glazed crushed steatite. He calls for more detailed examination of samples removed from...

An assemblage of glassy materials from Culduthel, an Iron Age site in north-east Scotland, mainly comprises fragments and beads of just a few millimetres in size and is unique in the region. The glasses were analysed by scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive X- ray analysis. Opaque red glass comprises mainly droplets and fragments, is typical of the late Iron Age and may have been used to manufacture inlay in copper alloy metalwork recovered from the site. Compositional characteristics of the red suggest that it was derived from a single block or ingot. Opaque yellow occurs mainly as beads and antimonyopacified and lesser amounts of tin-opacified glass are present. Evidence for the melting of antimony-opacified yellow glass occurs in a composite fragment of opaque red, yellow and colourless glass and may reflect the manufacture of beads. Blue glass is less abundant and more variable in composition; it is likely to have been acquired over a longer period. The base glass for the majority of samples is the high-lime, high-alumina manganese-decolourised variety, typical of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods and originating in the Levant. The absence of low-lime, low-alumina antimony-decolourised Roman glass from the assemblage indicates an original date of manufacture before the middle of the first century CE.

The Archaeological Museum at the American University of Beirut (AUB) lies approximately 3 km west of the main port of Beirut, the site of the massive explosion that sent a catastrophic shockwave through the city on 4 August 2020. A display case containing Classical and early Islamic period glass vessels was smashed against the museum's stone floor, shattering 72 vessels into thousands of shards. This paper overviews how the Archaeological Museum (AM) responded to the situation with international partners to document, collect, identify, study, conserve and restore the broken pieces, and how this process of recovery would ultimately imbue the vessels with new historical resonance. In particular, the paper presents a collaborative project with the British Museum (BM) that developed from broader international-AM efforts. The partnership had three objectives: (i) to reconstruct eight of the shattered vessels in conservation laboratories at the BM; (ii) to provide training for a museum professional from the AM as part of the restoration programme in London; and (iii) to conduct scientific analyses of the broken shards before conservation. A fourth objective was realized August-October 2022, when the reconstructed vessels were featured in a single-room exhibition at the BM titled Shattered Glass of Beirut, jointly developed by AM and BM curators, in which the vessels helped tell a broader story about the port explosion and its effects on the people of Lebanon.

The first analyses of white porcelain from a newly discovered Sui to early Tang dynasty workshop site at Yiyongjie, Luoyang, are presented. SEM-EDS indicates that the Luoyang products were less vitrified than those of more famous kilns such as Xing and Anyang but the discovery of identical wares in residential areas of the city and burials indicates that they fulfilled the needs of consumers at the time. One production group is characterised by the addition of crushed quartz to whiten the body, while the addition of feldspathic material to the glazes appears to have been common. A group of wares for which there is no production evidence shows very low phosphate concentrations in some of the glazes, consistent with recent suggestions that early northern porcelain glazes were fluxed with a mixture of vegetal ash and limestone. The new data provide important evidence for the nature of the transition from celadon to porcelain production in the North. They suggest that an experimental approach was common across the region and was not confined to those kilns which later emerged as the most successful. They emphasise the need for a focus beyond the major kilns if the nature of ceramic innovation in the period is to be fully understood.

This paper presents the results of spectrometric analysis of Iron Age glass from Novo Mesto, Lower Carniola, Slovenia. Several different glass types were detected in the assemblage. The results indicate that raw glass was imported to Novo Mesto from eastern Mediterranean centres and corroborate the existence of long-distance trade during the first millennium BCE.