Projects by Tim Penn
The Manar al-Athar digital archive, based at the University of Oxford, provides high resolution, ... more The Manar al-Athar digital archive, based at the University of Oxford, provides high resolution, searchable images for teaching, research, and publication. These images of archaeological sites, buildings and art, cover the areas of the former Roman empire which later came under Islamic rule, such as Syro-Palestine/the Levant, Egypt and North Africa, as well as some bordering regions, such as Georgia and Armenia. The chronological range is from Alexander the Great (i.e., from about 300 BC) through the Islamic period. It is the first website of its kind providing such material labelled jointly in both Arabic and English.
The digital archive is in continuous development. Current strengths include Late Antiquity (250–750 AD), the period of transition from paganism to Christianity, and then to Islam, especially religious buildings (temples, churches, synagogues, mosques) and monumental art (including floor mosaics), early Islamic art (paintings, mosaics, relief sculpture), as well as Roman and early Islamic (Umayyad) architecture, and evidence of iconoclasm.
The digital archive aims to: provide freely-downloadable images at high resolution for research and publication, as well as at low resolution for powerpoint slides for teaching; make images freely available for publication simply by acknowledging the source; have simple and accurate labels easy to search and organize, with bilingual text in Arabic and English to facilitate the use of the images for both teaching and research in the Arab world, where many of the monuments are located.
Books by Tim Penn
Games in the Ancient World: Places, Spaces, Accessories, 2024
Le volume réunit une série d’études présentées lors de colloques organisés par le projet ERC Locu... more Le volume réunit une série d’études présentées lors de colloques organisés par le projet ERC Locus Ludi (#741520) ainsi que d’autres contributions. Un large éventail de cas met en lumière la diversité culturelle des comportements dans l’espace et le temps. Ces études révèlent l’étendue géographique et chronologique des pratiques ludiques, de l’Égypte pharaonique à la Grande-Bretagne romaine et à la périphérie celtique du haut Moyen Âge.
Malgré l’abondance de témoignages, le matériel conservé est souvent fragmentaire et dispersé, occulté par la perception occidentale moderne des jeux comme des passe-temps futiles.
En déconstruisant la complexité des pratiques ludiques antiques, cet ouvrage met en lumière l’intersection des jeux avec la vie sociale, culturelle et religieuse dans l’Antiquité, et livre une perspective nouvelle sur un aspect jusqu’ici négligé de l’histoire humaine.
Ancient Games and Gaming by Tim Penn
Games in the Ancient World: Places, Spaces, Accessories, 2024
Existing scholarship on gaming of... more Games in the Ancient World: Places, Spaces, Accessories, 2024
Existing scholarship on gaming often assumes that board games were primarily played in towns under the Roman empire and textual sources leave us in no doubt that game-playing was an important part of the urban experience. But it is also important to consider the extent to which games were played in the countryside. This contribution seeks to set the agenda for future research into playing and games in Roman rural settings by interrogating the urbancentric biases of literary sources. It juxtaposes the
town-centric view provided by the textual tradition with the archaeological evidence from selected rural sites of different types across Roman Italy. This
approach provides new insights into play and leisure in non-urban contexts
In Games in the Ancient World: Places, Spaces, Accessories, 2024
In Games in the Ancient World: Places, Spaces, Accessories, 2024
GameTable COST Action: Kickoff Report, 2024
The GameTable COST Action kickoff, focusing on "Computational Techniques for Tabletop Games Herit... more The GameTable COST Action kickoff, focusing on "Computational Techniques for Tabletop Games Heritage," took place at Leiden University in the Pieter de la Court Building from January 29th to 30th, 2024. This event aimed to convene researchers from diverse backgrounds involved in the Action, offering an opportunity to present an overview of the key research areas, share concrete case studies, and facilitate discussions and idea exchanges across fields that may not typically intersect, thereby enhancing the organization of the Action. This report provides a summary of the organization and discussions of the event, and future plans for GameTable.
Board Game Studies Journal 17, 2023
Characterised by the presence of multiple depressions or pockets in a variety of arrangements, an... more Characterised by the presence of multiple depressions or pockets in a variety of arrangements, and, in some cases, the presence of a single, double, or triple ‘start line’ carved into horizontal stone surfaces, marble lanes in their variety of forms open a window onto ancient play that few have looked through. Thought to be a playing surface for some kind of throwing or rolling game which involved the use of glass or ceramic spheres, Roman marble lanes have received comparatively little attention in the recent upswing of scholarship on ancient play, partially as a result of the relative dearth of textual and iconographic sources discussing or depicting their usage, but these
playing surfaces nevertheless represent a major corpus of ludic material. This contribution summarises past work on marble lanes before exploring the limited textual and iconographic source material related to playing with marbles. It offers a tentative new typology by which to categorise marble lanes and a non-exhaustive list of these playing surfaces recorded at archaeological sites around the Mediterranean. It then moves onto a discussion of the game/games that may be played on these boards, arguing that the wide variations in the different layouts for marble lanes may indicate that they were used not for one tightly defined game, but more likely facilitated the playing of a loosely connected family of games, with implications for how we think about communities of play in the past.
Pallas 119, 2022
You might have been there: losing a cherished piece from your favourite boardgame and searching f... more You might have been there: losing a cherished piece from your favourite boardgame and searching for a way to still play without it. Perhaps you used a substitute: a coin, a piece of cardboard, or a piece from another gaming set, or you bought a new one from the specialist retailers which now cater to this niche market. Abundant finds of gaming pieces from a huge variety of contexts across the Roman world underline that accidental loss of gaming paraphernalia is by no means a modern phenomenon, but little attention has been given to the impact of losing a gaming piece on the experience of ancient board gaming. This paper suggests that we may occasionally be able to detect evidence for substitutions in “patchwork” gaming sets, which comprise an asymmetrical mix of counters of different styles or materials. This asymmetry may arguably sometimes arise from a set of counters composed over time, as pieces are lost, broken, or given away, whether as gifts to the living or to the dead. We suggest that the object biographies of gaming sets made up of a mixture of materials would
have evoked the memory of past games and previous gaming partners.
PALLAS , 119, 2022, pp. 241-262
Roman Finds Group Datasheet 13, 2021
ISSN 2634-4491
When we think about games in the Roman world, many of us may first conjure up... more ISSN 2634-4491
When we think about games in the Roman world, many of us may first conjure up vivid images of the arena; it is perhaps less likely that our immediate thoughts will be of board games. The study of Roman board games has until recently focussed on the reconstruction of gaming rules from textual references and surviving board de-signs. New work is now increasingly putting the social aspect of leisure time into greater fo-cus, through the collation and analysis of corpora of gaming paraphernalia, primarily boards, dice and counts. This datasheet arises from a research project undertaken by the authors which aimed to unite the evidence for all gaming boards in Roman Britain and to examine their distribution (for a preliminary report, see Courts and Penn 2019). It will provide a concise guide to the identifi-cation and significance of known board game types from Roman Britain. A full digital catalogue of over 100 boards, along with a detailed analysis, will be published elsewhere.
Lucerna 57, 2019
This contribution draws together a corpus of c.100 gaming boards from Roman Britain cataloged by ... more This contribution draws together a corpus of c.100 gaming boards from Roman Britain cataloged by type. The data show that three types of games were played in Britain during the Roman period with a heavy emphasis on game playing among military communities, though board gaming also took place to a lesser degree in rural and urban civilian contexts. PDF available upon request.
Roman and late antique Archaeology by Tim Penn
The Place of Palms: An Urban Park at Aphrodisias, 2024
Wilson, A. I., B. Russell, A. B. Kidd, et al. “The End of the Place of Palms, Seventh Century AD.... more Wilson, A. I., B. Russell, A. B. Kidd, et al. “The End of the Place of Palms, Seventh Century AD.” In The Place of Palms: An Urban Park at Aphrodisias, edited by A. I. Wilson and B. Russell, 183–228. Wiesbaden: Reichert (2024).
The Place of Palms: An Urban Park at Aphrodisias, 2024
Kidd, A. B., B. Russell, A. I. Wilson, et al. “After Antiquity: The Byzantine to Ottoman Periods.... more Kidd, A. B., B. Russell, A. I. Wilson, et al. “After Antiquity: The Byzantine to Ottoman Periods.” In The Place of Palms: An Urban Park at Aphrodisias, edited by A. I. Wilson and B. Russell, 229–268. Wiesbaden: Reichert (2024).
American Journal of Archaeology, 2024
This paper presents evidence for late fifth-century CE wall mosaics from Aphrodisias, provincial ... more This paper presents evidence for late fifth-century CE wall mosaics from Aphrodisias, provincial capital of Caria, Western Asia Minor. The mosaics formed part of the decoration of an upper story gallery belonging to one or more luxurious private residences located alongside the Tetrapylon Street, the city’s main north-south avenue. They are therefore a rare example of late antique wall mosaics from a domestic context. We present the context in which the mosaic fragments were found, the motifs that can still be recognized, and some of the technical characteristics of these mosaics. Combined with the other elements of decoration found in association with the mosaic fragments, we offer a reconstruction of the decorative program of the gallery. We then broaden our view to trace wall mosaics elsewhere at Aphrodisias and discuss waste attesting to glass tessera production. We argue that an itinerant wall mosaic workshop or workshops was/were active at Aphrodisias in the late fifth and early sixth century, when the city’s monuments and residences were undergoing renovations in the wake of an earthquake. We examine the possibility of a wall mosaic habit which was much more widespread than previously thought, extending beyond the ecclesiastical contexts with which it is conventionally associated .
Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 2024
The city of Taucheira (modern Tocra) in Cyrenaica, Libya, has played a prominent role in establis... more The city of Taucheira (modern Tocra) in Cyrenaica, Libya, has played a prominent role in established narratives of the 7th-century Arab conquest of Byzantine North Africa ever since excavations by Richard Goodchild in the 1960s uncovered a substantial walled compound there. Goodchild interpreted the compound as a fortress — “the last monument of Byzantine rule in Cyrenaica” — built in haste in the face of the approaching Arabs inside a much larger set of walls traditionally ascribed to the reign of Justinian I (r. 527–565). In the more than half a century since Goodchild’s publication of the walled compound, late antique and Byzantine studies have undergone radical transformations, but narratives around the walled compound at Taucheira, and about the city itself, have not been considered critically. This article presents a combined historical and archaeological reassessment of the city in light of contemporary developments in scholarship and argues that Taucheira was a vibrant urban centre throughout late antiquity, provided with walls at some point between the late 5th century and the Justinianic period. Detailed re-examination of the walled compound indicates it could not have served an effective defensive function and is better interpreted as an administrative area. Moreover, an Anastasian construction date is more probable than the conventionally accepted date in the 640s CE.
![Research paper thumbnail of (2024) Down the drain: reconstructing social practice from the content of two sewers in a Late Antique bathhouse in Jerash, Jordan, Journal of Roman Archaeology [open access]](https://images.weserv.nl/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fattachments.academia-assets.com%2F116410430%2Fthumbnails%2F1.jpg&q=12&output=webp&max-age=110)
This contribution examines social practices in the Central Bathhouse in Jerash in Late Antiquity ... more This contribution examines social practices in the Central Bathhouse in Jerash in Late Antiquity based on the ceramic assemblage, vessel glass, faunal remains, and small finds retrieved from two sections of the bathhouse's sewer. We argue that although the bathhouse underwent significant architectural alterations from its construction in the 4th c. CE to its abandonment in the late 7th, the activities taking place inside the building remained largely the same. Our study shows that even towards the end of the bathhouse's lifespan, bodily grooming remained integral to the bathing experience, while food and drink were consumed on the premises even though the bathing facilities had been reduced to a bare minimum. The faunal remains indicate the type of food consumed, while the small finds illustrate a lively environment where gaming and gambling took place in a social space frequented by men, women, and children.
T. Penn and S. Courts. (2024). ‘Glass.’ In P. P. Creasman, N. Doyle and C. Shelton (eds.) Petra's... more T. Penn and S. Courts. (2024). ‘Glass.’ In P. P. Creasman, N. Doyle and C. Shelton (eds.) Petra's Temple of Winged Lions: Excavation and Conservation Projects 1973–2005 and 2009–2021. American Center of Research Monograph Series, Amman. 583-614
Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 2023
Recent work in landscape archaeology has emphasized the importance of considering the experience ... more Recent work in landscape archaeology has emphasized the importance of considering the experience of moving through landscapes and examining the place of burials within wider landscape contexts. This work recognizes that burial placement was often intended to create and curate experiences and meaning. While burials near roads and waterways have been discussed at length, burials near tunnels, which are an important feature of the road network of Roman central Italy, have not yet featured in discussions of the experience of Roman landscapes or the visibility of graves. This article explores these twin themes in the Phlegraean Fields west of Naples, where burials appear next to the entrances of two monumental tunnels. This placement appears to make an experiential play on the perceptions of the descent into the Underworld as described in Classical literature.
Journal of Glass Studies, 2022
A group of late antique hexagonal and octagonal mold-blown flasks bearing Christian, Jewish, and ... more A group of late antique hexagonal and octagonal mold-blown flasks bearing Christian, Jewish, and Islamic symbols, as well as some without specific religious iconography, were first systematically studied by Dan Barag in the 1970s. 1 Most vessels from this group are in museum or private collections; few published examples come from secure archaeological contexts. Recent excavations undertaken in Jordan by the Late Antique Jarash Project (LAJP) have uncovered a hexagonal moldblown glass flask from the same group which bears Christian symbols. This note discusses the vessel's findspot, the flask itself, and its place within the wider published corpus of flasks.
Rivista di Studi Pompeiani, 2018
Studies of Roman glass from Campania focus principally on material from sites buried by the AD 79... more Studies of Roman glass from Campania focus principally on material from sites buried by the AD 79 eruption of Mt Vesuvius. Glass from Roman sites post-dating this volcanic event has received comparatively little attention. This contribution aims to help meet this shortcoming, by making available preliminary data from the first major post-AD 79 glass assemblage from a Roman rural site in the region. It presents finds excavated under the aegis of the Apolline Project at the Masseria De Carolis Roman villa with baths in Pollena Trocchia. In doing so, it will provide new data on glass consumption in a key region of the later Roman Empire.
N.B. this file is a proof so there are typing and formatting errors.
Anatolian Studies 71, 2021
Archaeological evidence and the text of the Strategikon show that it was only in the late sixth c... more Archaeological evidence and the text of the Strategikon show that it was only in the late sixth century AD that the Roman-Byzantine military adopted the stirrup. It is now widely argued that the Avars, who settled in the Carpathian basin in the sixth century, played a key role in introducing iron stirrups to the Roman-Byzantine world. However, the evidence to support this assertion is limited. Although hundreds of stirrups have been found in Avar graves in the Carpathian basin, very few stirrups of sixth- or seventh-century date are known from the Roman-Byzantine empire - no more than seven - and only two of these are of definitively Avar type. The text of the Strategikon, sometimes argued to support this Avar source, can be interpreted differently, as indeed can the archaeological evidence. While the debate about the Roman-Byzantine adoption of the stirrup has focused mostly on finds from the Balkans, two early stirrups are known from Asia Minor, from Pergamon and Sardis. This paper presents a third, previously unpublished stirrup, from a seventh-century deposit at Aphrodisias in Caria; this is the first stirrup found in Asia Minor from a datable context. Here we present this find and its context, and use it to reconsider the model of solely Avar stirrup transmission that has dominated scholarship to date. So varied are the early stirrups that multiple sources of influence, Avar and other, and even a degree of experimentation, seem more likely to underpin the Roman-Byzantine adoption of this technology.
Uploads
Projects by Tim Penn
The digital archive is in continuous development. Current strengths include Late Antiquity (250–750 AD), the period of transition from paganism to Christianity, and then to Islam, especially religious buildings (temples, churches, synagogues, mosques) and monumental art (including floor mosaics), early Islamic art (paintings, mosaics, relief sculpture), as well as Roman and early Islamic (Umayyad) architecture, and evidence of iconoclasm.
The digital archive aims to: provide freely-downloadable images at high resolution for research and publication, as well as at low resolution for powerpoint slides for teaching; make images freely available for publication simply by acknowledging the source; have simple and accurate labels easy to search and organize, with bilingual text in Arabic and English to facilitate the use of the images for both teaching and research in the Arab world, where many of the monuments are located.
Books by Tim Penn
Malgré l’abondance de témoignages, le matériel conservé est souvent fragmentaire et dispersé, occulté par la perception occidentale moderne des jeux comme des passe-temps futiles.
En déconstruisant la complexité des pratiques ludiques antiques, cet ouvrage met en lumière l’intersection des jeux avec la vie sociale, culturelle et religieuse dans l’Antiquité, et livre une perspective nouvelle sur un aspect jusqu’ici négligé de l’histoire humaine.
Ancient Games and Gaming by Tim Penn
Existing scholarship on gaming often assumes that board games were primarily played in towns under the Roman empire and textual sources leave us in no doubt that game-playing was an important part of the urban experience. But it is also important to consider the extent to which games were played in the countryside. This contribution seeks to set the agenda for future research into playing and games in Roman rural settings by interrogating the urbancentric biases of literary sources. It juxtaposes the
town-centric view provided by the textual tradition with the archaeological evidence from selected rural sites of different types across Roman Italy. This
approach provides new insights into play and leisure in non-urban contexts
playing surfaces nevertheless represent a major corpus of ludic material. This contribution summarises past work on marble lanes before exploring the limited textual and iconographic source material related to playing with marbles. It offers a tentative new typology by which to categorise marble lanes and a non-exhaustive list of these playing surfaces recorded at archaeological sites around the Mediterranean. It then moves onto a discussion of the game/games that may be played on these boards, arguing that the wide variations in the different layouts for marble lanes may indicate that they were used not for one tightly defined game, but more likely facilitated the playing of a loosely connected family of games, with implications for how we think about communities of play in the past.
have evoked the memory of past games and previous gaming partners.
PALLAS , 119, 2022, pp. 241-262
When we think about games in the Roman world, many of us may first conjure up vivid images of the arena; it is perhaps less likely that our immediate thoughts will be of board games. The study of Roman board games has until recently focussed on the reconstruction of gaming rules from textual references and surviving board de-signs. New work is now increasingly putting the social aspect of leisure time into greater fo-cus, through the collation and analysis of corpora of gaming paraphernalia, primarily boards, dice and counts. This datasheet arises from a research project undertaken by the authors which aimed to unite the evidence for all gaming boards in Roman Britain and to examine their distribution (for a preliminary report, see Courts and Penn 2019). It will provide a concise guide to the identifi-cation and significance of known board game types from Roman Britain. A full digital catalogue of over 100 boards, along with a detailed analysis, will be published elsewhere.
Roman and late antique Archaeology by Tim Penn
N.B. this file is a proof so there are typing and formatting errors.
The digital archive is in continuous development. Current strengths include Late Antiquity (250–750 AD), the period of transition from paganism to Christianity, and then to Islam, especially religious buildings (temples, churches, synagogues, mosques) and monumental art (including floor mosaics), early Islamic art (paintings, mosaics, relief sculpture), as well as Roman and early Islamic (Umayyad) architecture, and evidence of iconoclasm.
The digital archive aims to: provide freely-downloadable images at high resolution for research and publication, as well as at low resolution for powerpoint slides for teaching; make images freely available for publication simply by acknowledging the source; have simple and accurate labels easy to search and organize, with bilingual text in Arabic and English to facilitate the use of the images for both teaching and research in the Arab world, where many of the monuments are located.
Malgré l’abondance de témoignages, le matériel conservé est souvent fragmentaire et dispersé, occulté par la perception occidentale moderne des jeux comme des passe-temps futiles.
En déconstruisant la complexité des pratiques ludiques antiques, cet ouvrage met en lumière l’intersection des jeux avec la vie sociale, culturelle et religieuse dans l’Antiquité, et livre une perspective nouvelle sur un aspect jusqu’ici négligé de l’histoire humaine.
Existing scholarship on gaming often assumes that board games were primarily played in towns under the Roman empire and textual sources leave us in no doubt that game-playing was an important part of the urban experience. But it is also important to consider the extent to which games were played in the countryside. This contribution seeks to set the agenda for future research into playing and games in Roman rural settings by interrogating the urbancentric biases of literary sources. It juxtaposes the
town-centric view provided by the textual tradition with the archaeological evidence from selected rural sites of different types across Roman Italy. This
approach provides new insights into play and leisure in non-urban contexts
playing surfaces nevertheless represent a major corpus of ludic material. This contribution summarises past work on marble lanes before exploring the limited textual and iconographic source material related to playing with marbles. It offers a tentative new typology by which to categorise marble lanes and a non-exhaustive list of these playing surfaces recorded at archaeological sites around the Mediterranean. It then moves onto a discussion of the game/games that may be played on these boards, arguing that the wide variations in the different layouts for marble lanes may indicate that they were used not for one tightly defined game, but more likely facilitated the playing of a loosely connected family of games, with implications for how we think about communities of play in the past.
have evoked the memory of past games and previous gaming partners.
PALLAS , 119, 2022, pp. 241-262
When we think about games in the Roman world, many of us may first conjure up vivid images of the arena; it is perhaps less likely that our immediate thoughts will be of board games. The study of Roman board games has until recently focussed on the reconstruction of gaming rules from textual references and surviving board de-signs. New work is now increasingly putting the social aspect of leisure time into greater fo-cus, through the collation and analysis of corpora of gaming paraphernalia, primarily boards, dice and counts. This datasheet arises from a research project undertaken by the authors which aimed to unite the evidence for all gaming boards in Roman Britain and to examine their distribution (for a preliminary report, see Courts and Penn 2019). It will provide a concise guide to the identifi-cation and significance of known board game types from Roman Britain. A full digital catalogue of over 100 boards, along with a detailed analysis, will be published elsewhere.
N.B. this file is a proof so there are typing and formatting errors.
COPY CITATION TO CLIPBOARD
To be uploaded in 2025; email me for a PDF.
To be uploaded in 2025; PM me for an PDF access.
Available online (open access) at:
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/reinvention/issues/volume6issue2/penn/
The enjoyment of leisure time is an important part of the human experience. While much scholarly effort has been applied to investigating top-down entertainment types embodied by amphitheatre games or races in the circus, board gaming, a do-it-yourself kind of leisure activity, has received comparatively little attention. Past work has made important progress in reconstructing the rules of ancient games; examining the transmission of different kinds of games within the Roman world; and elucidating the connections between gaming, gambling and literacy. A common assumption running through many studies has been that gaming is characteristic of urban contexts where surplus currency and time allowed for gambling, a view which draws substantial support, at least in Italy, from textual sources. However, it is unclear whether this assumption holds true for the Roman Provinces, with their greater military presence. This paper contrasts these textual accounts with the material evidence for gaming and gambling in Roman Britain. Objects under consideration include dice, gaming pieces, and above all, gaming boards. Our own recent research on the distribution of gaming boards in Britain shows that the majority come from military contexts, and about as many gaming boards were found at rural sites as in cities. Additionally, there are divergences in the types of games played by different social groups, with communities connected to the army playing a wider range of games. Through consideration of the material evidence, we can therefore gain new insights into everyday leisure in Britain under the Roman Empire.
4th-7th centuries AD. Scholarly views have tended towards blanket explanations of the phenomenon by comparing the evidence from Italy with finds from Britain, Gaul, and the Iberian Peninsula. Possible interpretations range between the more mundane, such as a continued elite presence or the appearance of proto-villages, and the symbolic: the desire to be associated with solid structures or a link to the glorious past. However, the divergent nature of these sites, which vary massively in size and character, means they are best analysed in their local context. This paper focuses primarily on evidence in the area around Lake Garda in Northern Italy and its northern neighbour, the territory of Tridentum, today’s Trentino. It will elucidate the extremely local character of burial in or near rural buildings during late antiquity and the early middle ages. While on the shores of Lake Garda, burials inserted into a Roman complex may have had a cultic or ideological motive linked to particularly privileged graves, or sought to provide a secure final resting place for deceased members of an armed garrison, the evidence for reuse of Roman buildings in Trentino is far more restricted and makes up a small part of the overall funerary record. Where they do appear, it is in built up areas, suggesting pragmatic motives such as the most efficient use of land or the desire to avoid plough damage to graves. This paper therefore aims to foster a greater understanding of heterogeneous factors governing the position of late antique graves relative to reused structures, by highlighting how in some areas rural sites saw topographical continuity combined with functional change and in others, the vestiges of earlier habitation were not considered appropriate locations for burial.
(Presented at the. 3rd Annual Edinburgh International Graduate Conference in Late Antique, Islamic, and Byzantine Studies: Historical Inertia: Continuity in the Face of Change 500-1500 CE, University of Edinburgh, 22nd-23rd November 2019)
This paper focuses on the vessel glass and bracelets from Barda which can be dated to the between the 10th and the 14th century. It will combine diachronic quantitative analysis of the types of glass objects in circulation with detailed interrogation of individual artefacts. Preliminary analysis of the vessel glass shows that there was a strong preference for open forms, principally beakers and small bowls, indicating that glass was primarily used for drinking and serving. Though some closed form vessels are present, these are far less common than their ceramic equivalents, suggesting that glass was not often used for storage and/or pouring. A limited range of glass colours are present throughout the period under examination, with a strong predominance of blueish-green fabrics. While chemical analysis of this glass is still ongoing, some vessels appear to have been worked locally, as is suggested by the recovery of several fragments of raw glass of similar fabrics. However, other items, such as three fragments of luster-painted glass vessels, traditionally thought to have been produced in Syria, may denote connections to wider networks of exchange for luxury products. Furthermore, analysis of the corpus of glass bracelets suggests that these items were a frequent part of personal adornment at Barda, as in many other sites of the period. Consideration of the ranges of decoration employed on these bracelets as well as comparison with metal dress items recovered in the excavations suggests a complex interplay between artefacts made in these different materials. For example, glass bracelets, whether with simple circular sections or twisted thread decorations, may seek to imitate copper alloy bracelets with similar types of decoration. This possible skeuomorphism could imply a hierarchy of dress accessories, with metal objects worn by those with slightly greater economic means and glass standing in as a cheaper substitute.
This contribution will provide an overview of the choices which the occupants of Barda made in their use of glass and allow us to explore the changing ways that these objects were employed in everyday life, and expanding our knowledge of society in this part of the Caucasus during the medieval period.
Securely stratified assemblages of glass objects dating to the late antique and medieval periods remain comparatively rare in Iran and across the wider Iranian region (including the Transcaucasus). Analysis of the glass finds from the Gorgan Wall Project’s excavations, many of which can be closely dated through the application of radiocarbon dating, may therefore permit us to sharpen or confirm the dating of some glass objects. Moreover, as our knowledge of glass typologies from the Sasanian and medieval worlds increases, this provides an affordance to use glass as dating evidence for artifact scatters recovered during field survey. Accordingly, the presence of highly diagnostic glass fragments provides the exciting possibility of using glass to aid the dating of sites. Detailed examination of these finds therefore represents a rare opportunity to demonstrate the potential value of glass not only for understanding excavated sites but also in field surveys.
The Gorgan Wall Project’s finds will be contextualised through reference to recent comparable glass finds with strong evidence for dating, in particular those recovered during the investigation of the late antique settlement at Qaratepe (Barda Rayon, Azerbaijan) and the slightly later fortress at Dariali Gorge (Georgia). Comparisons of glass finds from these sites may also allow for the tentative identification of regional trends in glass production. For example, whilst ribbed bowls were recovered by all three projects, variations in the details of the molds used may imply a range of local production centres aspiring to achieve a similar style across the Sasanian and post-Sasanian world. Taken together, this work will contribute to our developing understanding of the place of glass in the late antique and medieval worlds.
[Poster presented at Glass of the Caesars @ 30: 1987-2017. 3-4/11/2017, British Museum, London (UK).]
[Poster presented at Sepolture di prestigio nel bacino mediterraneo (IV-IX sec.): definizione, immagini, utilizzo. 28-30/06/2017, Pella (Italy)].