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The composition of colourless glass: a review

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Abstract

A total of 1496 investigated colourless glass analyses have been collected with the aim of achieving a clear geographical, typological, chronological and compositional overview on this particular type of glass. Based on manganese and antimony contents, four main groups were characterised: naturally colourless, Mn-decoloured, Sb-decoloured and Mn/Sb-decoloured. Main achievements relates to the chronological distribution of manganese and antimony technologies, the former being associated to a long lasting technology which culminated during the Late Antique period while the latter being practically absent after the 8th century AD, being at its acme during the Roman imperial period. Except for naturally colourless glass, glass-making technology mostly implied the use of impure sands and natron, relegating the other components to a virtually irrelevant presence, except during the  Late Antique and Medieval periods.

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References

The papers including measurements on colourless glass are indicated with *. Please note that all of them have been used in order to prepare Table 1 but only some of them have been quoted in text, in fact, several items were not attributed to the colourless glass groups due to the lack of MnO and/or Sb measurements. The complete list of collected references has been provided as a convenience to the researcher.

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  1. Department of Earth, Environment and Physical Sciences, University of Siena, via Laterina 8, 53100, Siena, Italy

    Elisabetta Gliozzo

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Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary Figure 1.

Colourless glass through the centuries. The different period are listed based on numbering shown in Table 3. The question mark indicates those items for which a dating was not provided by the Authors. (JPEG 14 kb)

High resolution image (TIFF 17118 kb)

Supplementary Figure 2.

Pie chart showing type and frequency of production indicators. (JPEG 26 kb)

High resolution image (TIFF 28918 kb)

Supplementary Table 1.

Primary and secondary Mn- and Sb- bearing common minerals. A complete list of common Sb-bearing mineralogical phases can be found in Anderson (2012). Uncommon Sb-bearing minerals including As, Co, Ni, Fe, Pb or Cu have been also included. (DOCX 18 kb)

Supplementary Table 2.

Morphological details on the 671 colourless vessels for which a vessel form is available. Column “No.” reports the number of items defined exactly as reported in column “form”. The column types specifies the types indicated in literature preceded by the number of their attestations. The geographic and bibliographic references have been provided in the last two columns. (DOCX 26 kb)

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Gliozzo, E. The composition of colourless glass: a review. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 9, 455–483 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-016-0388-y

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