The most recent edition of the Science magazine (Volume 329, Number 5991, Issue of 30 July 2010) picked a publication by Professor Julian Henderson (Nottingham), Jane Evans (NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory) and Kalliopi Nikita (Nottingham) as Editors' Choice. The article Isotopic evidence for the primary production, provenance and trade of late Bronze Age glass in the Mediterranean deals with the first isotopic evidence for isotopic evidence for primary production, provenance and trade in some of the earliest glass.
Extract from the Science website:
Tracing the Ancient Glass Trade
Brooks Hanson
The development of colored glass and its formation into vessels marked a major innovation in the early Bronze Age. Artisans learned how to heat the two main ingredients, silica sand and a plant ash, in large containers. The plant ash served as the source of soda-lime flux that decreased the melting point of the glass. Colored glass vessels, which appeared about 1600 B.C.E. in Mesopotamia and later in Egypt and elsewhere around the Eastern Mediterranean, became prized possessions. The variety of sites where glass has been found has made it difficult to ascertain the location of the main centers of production and the extent of glass trading. Henderson et al. analyzed strontium and neodymium isotopes in a variety of early glass samples from Greece, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Read more...
The full citation of the paper is:
Henderson, J., Evans, J. and Nikita, K. Isotopic evidence for the primary production, provenance and trade of late Bronze Age glass in the Mediterranean. Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 1‐24.
Posted on Monday 2nd August 2010