Contextualizing a Collection: Compositional, Morphological, and Trade Network Insights from an Iron Age Collection of Rare Southeast Asian Glass Ornaments

Summary

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 fragmented objects. This study reports on a unique collection of seven complete glass earrings, five complete glass bangles, and a single spiral ornament donated to the University of Oregon for repatriation to Cambodia and believed to originate from the site of Phum Snay, Cambodia. Here, we contextualize this collection within the corpus of glass ornaments circulating in Iron Age Southeast Asia and report on results from compositional analysis of six of these objects using LA-ICP-MS. Results from this analysis identified multiple glass types, including potash glass and high-alumina soda glass. This research is ultimately relevant for its novel compositional and morphological data and insight into the circulation of these ornaments in regional exchange networks.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35693.0