#GOLD TESSERAE WINDOWS#
Colours for trailed decoration on vessels, for vessel bodies and for sheet glass for windows were largely produced by melting the glass tesserae from old Roman mosaics. The majority of the glass compositions can be paralleled by Roman glass from the first to third centuries, with very few samples consistent with later compositional groups. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0076479 136 glasses from the ninth-century monastery of San Vincenzo and its workshops have been analysed by electron microprobe in order to situate the assemblage within the first millennium CE glass making tradition. Schibille N, Freestone IC (2013) Composition, Production and Procurement of Glass at San Vincenzo al Volturno: An Early Medieval Monastic Complex in Southern Italy. We recount this sorry and cautionary tale, but also provide the results of recent research including the 'discovery' and now publication of two important 19th-century excavation plans. Also sad is the fact that most of the finds recovered from the various 19th-and 20th-century excavations are not kept in museums instead, many finds were given away or not retained. Ultimately, in the 1950s, the lack of adequate financial resources resulted in the then owners and guardians of the villa, the Sussex Archaeological Trust, deciding to sell the site for building development. It is ultimately a very sad story, beginning with various very poorly recorded excavations in the 19th century before eventual large-scale but still poorly documented excavations and then public display in the 1930s. This paper provides a history of the discovery, excavation, attempts at interpretation, public display, ownership, and eventual loss/general destruction of one of the most important archaeological sites to have been found in Sussex: a large early Roman villa (or 'mini-palace') at Southwick.
Our results suggest that the tesserae said to be from Southwick are anomalous in relation to the other material and cannot be assigned to the Roman period. For comparative reasons, the handful of coloured glass tesserae from Southwick were also analysed. However, the provenance of these Southwick tesserae remains doubtful and so they were analysed and compared to gold glass tesserae from Roman London to try and establish whether they are compositionally related to typical Roman glass. Gold glass tesserae, however, in which gold leaf is sandwiched between two layers of glass, are very unusual: fewer than twenty such tesserae are known from Roman Britain and the seven examples from Southwick make up the largest single group. Glass tesserae are not common in a British setting but they are by no means unusual in Roman mosaics. The site is no longer accessible, being underneath a Methodist chapel, but it has been excavated, to some extent, on several occasions. This paper seeks to characterise through elemental analysis some unusual gold glass tesserae said to have been found at a Roman villa site in Southwick, West Sussex.
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