Composition and texture of a set of marvered glass vessels from 12th century ad Branicevo, Serbia

Bibliographic Data

ID11993053
AuthorsThilo Rehren (0000-0002-9169-1198, Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture, The Cyprus Institute, Nicosia + UCL Institute of Archaeology, University College London, UK, corresponding author), Anastasia Cholakova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences), Sonja Jovanovi (Institute of Archaeology)
Year2018
Issue68
Pages125-149
Publication date2018-01-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueStarinar (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0350-0241 • E-ISSN: 2406-0739
PublisherNational Library of Serbia (PUBLISHER • RS)
DOI10.2298/sta1868125r
OpenAlexW2912213780
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited8

Strongly coloured glass vessels decorated with marvered threads of white glass are a wide-spread and popular, but rarely studied group of high-quality glassware of medieval Islamic origin. Relatively little is known about the composition and production places of these vessels, and their chronological range is not very well defined, as many of the published finds lack contextual evidence. Here, we present detailed chemical and microstructural data on a set of well-dated purple glass vessels decorated with white threads, excavated at the Mali Grad site in Branicevo, Serbia, in an archaeological context dated to the middle/second half of the 12th century AD. The set comprises at least sixteen different vessels, manufactured from two different batches of probably Levantine plant-ash glass coloured by manganese oxide. Significantly, the results demonstrate that these batches are correlated to particular vessel shapes. The base glass of the white threads is comparable to that of the purple vessel glass, but instead of being coloured by added manganese oxide, it contains considerable amounts of tin and lead oxides which provide the effect of opacity and white colour. No difference in composition can be seen between the white glass threads used to decorate the vessels from the two different manganese-coloured batches, thus indicating a likely common production origin of the whole set

Archaeology · Context (archaeology · Geography · Glass production · Manganese · Manganese oxide · Metallurgy · Mineralogy · Texture (cosmology · White (mutation · Building materials and conservation · Chemistry · Computer Science · Conservation Techniques and Studies · Cultural Heritage Materials Analysis · Materials Science · Geology

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