PICKING UP THE HINT: RAW GLASS CHUNKS AND GLASS WASTES FROM PLOUGHSOIL COLLECTION IN AQUILEIA (ITALY)

Despite many well-known indications suggesting the presence of a flourishing glass production in Aquileia during the Roman age, to date no furnace has ever been identified. In November 2017, during field-walking survey activities part of the EC funded landscape archaeology project Visualising Engineered Landscape (VEiL), an extraordinary concentration of hundreds of raw glass chunks and shards of glass was identified on the surface of a ploughed field in the Northern fringes of the Roman city, just outside the ancient city walls. Fragments collected included several chunks encrusted on refractory material (the majority being natural bluegreen, with smaller quantities in blue and olive green), droplets and trails together with other glass working wastes and fragments of vessels. This remarkable in situ plough soil assemblage, clustered in a relatively small spatial dispersion, may reflect the existence of a secondary glass workshop. This paper expands on the satellite imagery analysis and the field prospections that led to the identification of the archaeological context and the preliminary outcomes provided by morphological and archaeometric analysis including Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and UVVis Reflectance Spectroscopy carried out on some of the most relevant samples of glass recovered. This new discovery could represent a unique opportunity to expand our current understanding of use and consumption of glass in Roman period in the area and the broader northern Adriatic context.