Stefi Floreani

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.