The Experienced Researcher (ER) visited a number of museums, where she studied and catalogued objects from early excavations related to glass-working and faience manufacture: The Egyptian Museum, Berlin, The World Museum and the Garstang Museum, Liverpool, Manchester Museum, the British Museum and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, London, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the KMKG/MRAH, Brussels, the Metropolitan Museum, New York and the Corning Museum of Glass, New York state. Additional objects with a reliable archaeological context from modern excavations were also added to the database and partially studied.
The ER had access to archival material at the Egypt Exploration Society and manuscripts by Flinders Petrie in the Petrie Museum in London, and from the excavations of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft at Assur. In addition, the archives of the 2006-12 Gurob excavations were consulted, as well as those covering the work of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at Malqata in the 1910s.
She created a spatial database of all known ovens, kilns, and other firing structures for each site. During the 2017 season at Amarna, the ER carried out experimental work recreating small firing structures and possible domestic glass-working techniques. In addition, a surface survey was carried out at the site in order to understand the extent to which such domestic firing structures may remain present in the archaeological record.
All this data was digitsed and added to a specific GIS project for each of the sites. The ER subsequently developed raster maps for each site, which enabled her to identify areas of concentrated industrial activity and overlaps in object categories.
The Egyptian sites covered are Tell el-Amarna, Gurob and Malqata. The ER collected spatial and artefactual information on the following Mesopotamian, Levantine and Syrian settlements: Tell Alalakh (southern Turkey), Assur (northern Iraq), Kar Tukulti Ninurta (near Assur), Nuzi (Iraq), Tell Ashara Terqa (Syria), Tell Brak (north-eastern Syria,) and Ugarit (north-western Syria). This was mainly done by carefully studying the bibliographical record related to these sites.
All object data acquired by the ER during museum visits has been made available to museums. The ER has presented a total of 7 papers and one poster at international conferences and held 3 public lectures during the course of the project. A workshop entitled “Approaches in the Analysis of Production at Archaeological Sites” is in preparation, and it will take place in January 2018.
Results:
1) In the course of the project it became evident that the site of Tell el-Amarna yielded the largest quantity of material. Consequently, it was possible to carry out a more extensive spatial analysis for Amarna than for the other analysed settlement sites.
2) The ER has been able to demonstrate that there was a preference for blue glass objects, and that the amounts of glass coloured with cobalt and with copper are almost equal, providing an insight into the value of both colourants and glass. Inhabitants of elite houses were likely to have overseen or controlled vitreous materials manufacturing activities in their area.
3) The analysis of vitreous materials manufacture, together with the production of foodstuffs at a domestic level at Amarna, Malqata, Tell Brak and Ugarit has demonstrated that the domestic vitreous materials industry in Egypt was more wide-spread than previously thought, with some elite and royal control, but within a generally much more diverse industrial landscape. Simultaneously, it has been shown that the industry present at contemporary Near Eastern cities appears to have been much more centrally-controlled, with most evidence of glass-working occurring in and around institutional buildings, such as temples and palaces.
4) The ER has been able to draw some conclusions on the nature of the firing structures used in domestic vitreous materials manufacture and other household activities, possibly even including bread baking by conducting a firing experiment with a set of two small, ephemeral oven structures at Amarna. In addition, by conducting a surface survey at Amarna, the ER gained much information on the nature of the publication record connected with ovens and firing structures.
5) The ER has studied the shapes and sizes of glass ingot fragments found at Amarna, both in museum collections and at the site, and compared them with the glass ingots from the Uluburun shipwreck; and with industrial ceramics from Amarna. She has thus gained an understanding of the production of raw glass and secondary ingots throughout Amarna. In addition, this study has provided some hints on export and trade networks, indicating that glass ingots were manufactured at Amarna and consumed on site, but also, possibly, traded.
6) The work carried out by the ER can be regarded as the first attempt at quantifying the remains of the Amarna glass industries, which appear to have been more vast than previously believed to exist in museum collections. By studying the individual object categories, it has been possible to acquire deep insight into the chaîne opératoire of glass-working.
