Archaeometry & Materials Analysis: Glass Analysis (Other Keyword)
1-24 (24 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Glass—and particularly the glass bead—was a common commodity of Indian Ocean trade, beginning as early as the mid-first millennium BCE and continuing through the second millennium CE. While existing elemental and isotopic analyses of glass beads recovered from outside India have identified glass production recipes likely from...
Ancient Beads from Southeast Asia at the Corning Museum of Glass (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2026, the Corning Museum of Glass—a world-renowned institution for glass studies in upstate New York—will update its major permanent exhibit of historical glass, “35 Centuries of Glass.” This reinstallation is committed to telling a more global, inclusive, and contextualized history of glass that features little-known and...
The Appearance, Use, and Production of Glass in Ancient Sub-Saharan West Africa (2019)
This is an abstract from the "African Archaeology throughout the Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the commodities heading south across the Saharan Desert over the past 2000+ years was glass. The typical form was as beads, but vessel glass and other forms also have been recorded. Glass not only was imported but at some point in the past also was produced by indigenous populations for local and regional consumption. Advances in...
An Assessment of the Intrinsic Water Content to Understanding Obsidian Hydration: A Case Study of Paleolithic Obsidian from the Shirataki Region in Hokkaido, Japan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Obsidian Studies of the Old and New Worlds" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the various factors that potentially affect the obsidian hydration rates, intrinsic water content of obsidian has been considered a significant factor. Despite this understanding, variation in water content even within the geochemically identical provenance of obsidian makes us difficult to evaluate the effect of water content...
Colonial Glass Production in Mexico City: A Study on Technology Transfer and Adaptation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The technology to make glass was brought to Mexico by Spanish glass artisans shortly after the Conquest in the sixteenth century. In the process of transferring their technological knowledge to the New World, these glass artisans encountered several challenges as they established workshops in Mexico City and Puebla, but were able to adapt the technology to the...
A Comparison of the Glass Bead Trade at Unguja Ukuu and Kizimkazi Dimbani, Zanzibar (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unguja Ukuu (sixth–eleventh cenuries CE) and Kizimkazi Dimbani (twelfth century CE) are early trading sites on Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania in eastern Africa. Here we investigate patterns of glass bead trade at these sites, examining continuities and change between sites and over time. Glass bead samples from...
Comparisons and Connections between Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Glass Bead Assemblages in Paugvik, AK, and Beatty Curve, OR (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Glass Beads and Ornaments in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers two collections of glass beads excavated from residential contexts in Paugvik, Alaska (nineteenth century CE) and Beatty Curve, Oregon (nineteenth–twentieth centuries CE), and housed in the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History. Using LA-ICP-MS analysis, around 30 beads from each...
Contextualizing a Collection: Compositional, Morphological, and Trade Network Insights from an Iron Age Collection of Rare Southeast Asian Glass Ornaments (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Though Iron Age (500 BCE–500 CE) Southeast Asian glass ornament research is a well-established field, previous studies have almost exclusively examined the glass beads comprising the majority of glass ornament assemblages at Iron Age Southeast Asian sites. Even when other ornament types are noted, these descriptions are of...
Geoarchaeology, Geochemical and Spatial Distributions of the Obsidian Source in Southern Mendoza (Argentina): The Case of Coche Quemado Source (2018)
During the last twenty years, four primary obsidian sources have been recorded in southern Mendoza province. The archaeological record indicates that all were used from the Holocene until pre-hispanic times, however many obsidian artifacts still are assigned to unknown sources. Recent surveys allowed discovery a new obsidian source called Coche Quemado. It is located in the western margin of the lower basin of the Rio Grande, in the Mendoza Andean piedmont. The obsidian from the source appears...
Glass Bangles from Saudi Arabia in the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents research on glass bangle fragments believed to be from the Al Hasa oasis in Saudi Arabia, donated to the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History (MNCH). Glass bangles were manufactured and widely traded across the Middle East and South Asia, but there has not yet been a comprehensive...
Glass Beads along the Early Maritime Silk Route: A View from Southeast China (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the fifth century BCE to the early centuries CE, glass beads played an important role as trade goods along the Maritime Silk Route, with large numbers found at coastal and inland sites in South, Southeast, and East Asia. Archaeology and compositional analysis have identified distinct glass recipes and likely...
Glass Beads from Bumbusi in Northwest Zimbabwe: Intersection of History and Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The northwestern parts of Zimbabwe lie at a critical junction between the Indian and Atlantic Oceans and—during the late Iron Age—witnessed major cultural changes. This includes possible migrations historically tied to the decline of major states to the south. Beads lubricated these transformations, making it possible to connect...
Glass Beads from Saudi Arabia in the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will present information on a subsection of glass beads from a diverse collection of artifacts that are presumed to be from the Al Hasa Oasis region in Saudi Arabia and donated to the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History (MNCH). Although glass beads and objects are a commonly studied artifact in...
The Glass Beads of Songo Mnara, Tanzania (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of Songo Mnara lies on a small island of the same name just to the south of Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania. It was occupied mainly in the fifteenth century CE and its assemblage of 7,444 glass beads provides us with a unique view into Indian Ocean trade to East Africa in this period. A comprehensive study of...
Glass Production in Sri Lanka: New Data from Giribawa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A little more than 25 years ago, glass furnaces were discovered at Giribawa, a site located in the northwest part of the island of Sri Lanka. Chemical analysis revealed that raw glass and glass beads were certainly manufactured at this site. Excavations have resumed at Giribawa in 2022, with a special focus on the glass...
Horizons of Color, Shape, and Size: A Stratigraphic Analysis of Glass Beads in Fur Trade-Era Onöndowa’ga:’ (Seneca) Towns (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Glass Beads and Ornaments in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. George Hamell’s 1992 paper “The Iroquois and the World’s Rim: Speculations on Color, Culture, and Contact” considers color symbolism in the Seneca (Onöndowa’ga:’) context to contemplate the metaphysics of the colors red, black, and white in Seneca cosmology and material culture. While widely cited within archaeological...
Indian Ocean Glass Beads from Miyoba Mound in the Kafue River Floodplain, Zambia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reports on an assemblage of Indian Ocean glass beads excavated from the Middle Iron Age mound of Miyoba in western Zambia, at the hook of the Kafue River. Miyoba was a long-occupied settlement during the late first and early second millennium CE represented by approximately 5 m of occupation debris that includes house...
The Interaction of Aesthetics and Technology between East and West, from the Perspective of Glass Beads from Xinjiang, China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Tangible Things to Intangible Ideas: The Context of Pan-Eurasian Exchange of Crops and Objects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Xinjiang is located in the crossroads of the Silk Road and connected the Central Asia, South Asia and central China. During the 2nd to 1st millennia BC, glass beads were transferred from the West Asia and South Asia to central China through the Tianshan corridor and southern edge oasis...
Investigating Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Wendat Local Interactions Using Glass Bead Chemistry (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Glass Beads and Ornaments in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Glass trade beads are one of the earliest forms of European material culture to be integrated into Wendat daily lives in the early colonization period in the eastern Great Lakes region. From the late sixteenth century, Wendat and other Indigenous people traded, modified, and circulated these small durable possessions among...
“On the Road to Moorhead”: Contextualizing the Infrastructure of Transient Workers and Moorhead Saloons along the Minnesota and North Dakota Border (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the Civil War, the Midwest experienced unprecedented population growth. Keeping pace with the expansion of numerous commodity frontiers driven by the building of railways, cities such as Fargo, ND, and Moorhead, MN, became seasonal locales for thousands of transient...
Pushing Boundaries in the Scientific Investigation of Glass: A New Project to Source Ancient Indian Glass (2018)
Scientific investigation of archaeological glass has advanced, beginning in the early 2000’s, with studies relying more heavily on determination of trace element concentrations to differentiate production recipes depending on distinct ingredient sources and the use of larger corpuses of artifacts to more easily and reliably reveal production patterns. At the same time, isotope analyses (e.g., Pb, Sr and Nd) attempting to source raw materials used to manufacture glass in antiquity grew in...
Shards of Medical History: Artifacts from the Point San Jose Hospital Medical Waste Pit (2018)
While monitoring lead remediation activities around historic buildings at Point San Jose (now Fort Mason) in 2010, National Park Service archaeologists discovered thousands of human bones in a medical waste pit behind the former hospital. Large numbers of medical artifacts, primarily medicinal bottle shards, were also recovered from the pit. Many of these medicinal bottles were produced by the U.S. Army Hospital Department for a limited time during the Civil War (1862-1865). Such precise...
Something About Kutau-Bao: Understanding Dominant Obsidian Sources (2019)
This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After c. 50 years of research using a diverse range of geochemical techniques, patterns of movement for obsidian in the Pacific region, dating from the Pleistocene up to the historic period, have been documented comprehensively. Although there are eight high quality obsidian sources, by far the largest quantity of...
The Trade Bead Assemblage from the Chinook Middle Village at the Station Camp Site: Western Terminus of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Pacific County, Washington (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Research on Glass Beads and Ornaments in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation discusses a trade bead assemblage excavated from the Chinook Middle Village at the Station Camp/McGowan Site (45PC106), a location that can be considered the western terminus of the historic Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803–1806. The camp was situated at the likely site of a seasonally occupied Chinook...