File(s) not publicly available
Gold glass tesserae said to be from the Roman villa site at Southwick, West Sussex
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 23:57 authored by Liz JamesLiz James, G J Leigh, Nadine SchibilleThis 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. The site is no longer accessible, being underneath a Methodist chapel, but it has been excavated, to some extent, on several occasions. Glass tesserae are not common in a British setting but they are by no means unusual in Roman mosaics. 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. 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. For comparative reasons, the handful of coloured glass tesserae from Southwick were also analysed. 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.
History
Publication status
- Published
Journal
The Antiquaries JournalISSN
1758-5309Publisher
Cambridge JournalsExternal DOI
Volume
93Page range
93-107Department affiliated with
- History Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2016-01-13Usage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedKeywords
Licence
Exports
RefWorks
BibTeX
Ref. manager
Endnote
DataCite
NLM
DC