Adlington, LW;
(2017)
The Corning Archaeological Reference Glasses: New Values for "Old" Compositions.
Papers from the Institute of Archaeology
, 27
(1)
, Article 2. 10.5334/pia-515.
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Abstract
The Corning Archaeological Reference Glasses are widely used as standards in the analysis of archaeological and historical glasses, as their compositions were designed to approximate those of major glass types in antiquity. Scientific analysis of glass has played an important role in archaeology in recent years, in the study of raw materials, provenance determination, glass-making technology, the organisation of production and the recycling of glass (cf. Rehren and Freestone, 2015). Reference standards are used in chemical analysis to calibrate the equipment, to test the performance of the analytical equipment and the quality of the data generated, and to indicate the degree to which data are comparable with other data. To achieve this, the reference material must be homogeneous and its composition well-characterised. Since the development of the Corning glasses, their elemental compositions have been re-evaluated and new updated values suggested, most recently by Wagner et al (2012). However, the concentrations of three elements were not re-examined in that study and the values are still based on theoretical values. This paper provides a brief overview of the Corning reference glasses and recommendations for new values for the concentrations of two of these elements; sulphur and chlorine. These elements can be studied to understand technological processes involved in the making of glass. Sulphur concentrations can be an indicator of the chemical properties giving the glass its colour and the redox conditions of the furnace (Schreurs and Brill, 1984; Beerkens, 2003; Freestone and Stapleton, 2015), whereas chlorine concentrations serve as a marker of repeated melting or recycling (Al-Bashaireh et al., 2016), the addition of salt as a raw material (Gerth, Wedepohl and Heide, 1998; Wedepohl, 2003), and the melting temperature of the glass (Rehren, 2000). Both elements are also related to deterioration processes (Schreiner et al., 1999).
Type: | Article |
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Title: | The Corning Archaeological Reference Glasses: New Values for "Old" Compositions |
Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
DOI: | 10.5334/pia-515 |
Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.5334/pia-515 |
Language: | English |
Additional information: | Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Keywords: | Archaeometry, glass, analysis, corning, reference standards, methodology |
UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS |
URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1541267 |
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