Event: WEDS TALKS: Creating Color: Opaque Red Glass Production in Celtic Europe

ABSTRACT: In Iron Age Celtic temperate Europe (450/400 BCE to late 1st c. BCE), opaque red glass was used in the decoration of gold, copper alloy, and iron prestige goods such as helmets, swords, fibulae, chariots, and horse equipment. Opaque red glass was difficult to produce and to work into a final product; craftspeople needed intimate knowledge of the ingredients necessary to create and color a gem-like and easily workable red glass, the correct firing temperature and furnace conditions for melting, and various techniques for application to a metal surface. In this talk, I will address the technical know-how to create opaque red glass and its many associated products discovered through the analysis of glass samples from the late Iron Age and early Roman provincial period settlement of Mont Beuvray in France and an ongoing experimental project to recreate opaque red glass.

BIO: Rachel Wood is a PhD candidate in the Archaeology IDP at UCLA. Her research focuses on the value and social networks created through the trade, production, and consumption of opaque red glass in late Iron Age and early Roman provincial western and central Europe.