Ancient and Historic Glass Production in India: Preliminary Results of Raw Material Analyses

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.

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 India and South Asia, little else is known about the potential production sources within these regions. An NSF-supported project designed to explore ancient glass production in India has completed a second year of fieldwork, and preliminary results of elemental and isotopic analyses aimed at characterizing glass raw materials from India are now available. The foci of research in India were sampling glass raw materials (e.g., sand, reh [alkali source], etc.) from regions of known and presumed historic and ancient glass production. To this end, dozens of potential raw material loci have been sampled in five main regions of India (Tamil Nadu/Pondicherry, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh), and those materials have been or will be subjected to elemental and isotopic analyses. While not all raw material samples are clear matches with ancient glass recipes, preliminary elemental and isotopic results show connections to glasses from within and beyond India.

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): 36690.0