Glass groups, glass supply and recycling in late Roman Carthage
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Glass groups, glass supply and recycling in late Roman Carthage Nadine Schibille 1,2 & Allison Sterrett-Krause 3 & Ian C. Freestone 1
Received: 15 January 2016 / Accepted: 1 February 2016 # The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract Carthage played an important role in maritime exchange networks during the Roman and late antique periods. One hundred ten glass fragments dating to the third to sixth centuries CE from a secondary deposit at the Yasmina Necropolis in Carthage have been analysed by electron microprobe analysis (EPMA) to characterise the supply of glass to the city. Detailed bivariate and multivariate data analysis identified different primary glass groups and revealed evidence of extensive recycling. Roman mixed antimony and manganese glasses with MnO contents in excess of 250 ppm were clearly the product of recycling, while iron, potassium and phosphorus oxides were frequent contaminants. Primary glass sources were discriminated using TiO2 as a proxy for heavy minerals (ilmenite/spinel), Al2O3 for feldspar and SiO2 for quartz in the glassmaking sands. It was thus possible to draw conclusions about the chronological and geographical attributions of the primary glass types. Throughout much of the period covered in this study, glassworkers in Carthage utilised glass from both Egyptian and Levantine sources. Based on their geochemical Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12520-016-0316-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Nadine Schibille [email protected] * Ian C. Freestone [email protected]
1
Institute of Archaeology, UCL, 31-34 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY, UK
2
IRAMAT-CEB, UMR 5060, CNRS/Université d’Orléans, 3D rue de la Férollerie, 45071 Orléans, France
3
Department of Classics, College of Charleston, 66 George Street, Charleston, SC 29424, USA
characteristics, we conclude that Roman antimony and Roman manganese glasses originated from Egypt and the Levant, respectively, and were more or less simultaneously worked at Carthage in the fourth century as attested by their mixed recycling (Roman Sb-Mn). In the later fourth and early fifth centuries, glasses from Egypt (HIMT) and the Levant (two Levantine I groups) continued to be imported to Carthage, although the Egyptian HIMT is less well represented at Yasmina than in many other late antique glass assemblages. In contrast, in the later fifth and sixth centuries, glass seems to have been almost exclusively sourced from Egypt in the form of a manganese-decolourised glass originally described and characterised by Foy and colleagues (2003). Hence, the Yasmina assemblage testifies to significant fluctuations in the supply of glass to Carthage that require further attention. Keywords Carthage . Primary glass groups . Electron microprobe . HIMT . Recycling . Egyptian glass . Levantine glass
Introduction The growing body of data on glass assemblages paints an increasingly complex
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