Glass coloring and recycling in late antiquity: A new case study from Aquileia (Italy)

Aquileia is widely cited as a major Roman glassworking center, but this assumption is based on scarce archaeological evidence and supported by only a few indicators of production, mainly found out of archaeological context. This article discusses problems relating to the glass industry in Aquileia, presenting a new group of indicators of production, excavated in 2014, that includes fragments of a melting chamber, cullet, mosaic tesserae, and one glassworking tool. This new discovery, interpreted as a fourth-century context of glass coloring and recycling, is the first evidence of colored glass working ever investigated stratigraphically at Aquileia, and it adds new data to the complex picture of the structure of the Late Antique glass industry in the Roman town. The authors analyzed 15 glass samples by ESEM-EDS, demonstrating that glasses were recycled both by mixing mosaic tesserae with colorless glass and by re-melting or softening mosaic tesserae.