Abstracts Pliny and the Manufacture of Raw Glass Ian C Freestone Department of Scientific Research, The British Museum, London WC1B 3DG Pliny's Natural History was dedicated in AD 77, two years before his death. In it he provides us with a relatively clear description of the "old method of producing glass". He indicates that glass was made from a mixture of sand and nitrum (natron or natural soda). The sands at the mouth of the River Belus (Bay of Haifa) had been used traditionally for glass making and Egyptian soda was preferred. Rough glass was melted from sand and soda in furnaces. After this it was broken up into lumps and remelted in workshops where it was also coloured and fabricated into vessels.. Recent archaeological and analytical work, on late antique tank furnaces on the Levantine coast, on workshops and on lumps of raw glass from wrecks shows general agreement with the account of Pliny, as outlined above. However, the significance of several other comments is less clear. For example, he indicates that: sand was obtained around the mouth of the Volturno between Cuma and Literno in Italy raw glass was also made in the Gallic and Spanish provinces quarried sand (as opposed to beach sand?) was also used shells were added to the mixture "magnes lapis", variously interpreted as magnetite (iron oxide), magnesite (magnesium carbonate) or a manganese oxide was added to the batch. These issues are discussed from the perspective of our current understanding of the chemical composition of Roman and Byzantine glass, its chronological and geographical variations and in the light of current models of glass technology and the organisation of production. | Back to Abstracts | Back to the Timetable | | © 2002 by Xander Veldhuijzen | Last update |