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New Perspectives on Ancient Glass, with Katherine Larson
24 Plays2 years ago
In 1963, archaeologists from the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York began excavations in an ancient Levantine town called Jalame, in today’s Israel. For eight years they uncovered objects—many of which were brought back to the Corning—related to the production of glass in the Late Roman Empire. Most of the pieces produced in the Jalame workshop were workaday, monochrome items, but a few were more luxurious, such as a conical beaker decorated with blue dots (from copper). Untreated glass is naturally green or blue, from the iron found in sand, so the glass for this beaker would have to have been de-colorized with manganese. “The Jalame excavation was transformative because it was really the first scientific investigation of a glass workshop from antiquity,” says Katherine Larson, the guest for this episode of Curious Objects and curator of the exhibition "Dig Deeper: Discovering an Ancient Glass Workshop in Corning."
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Curious Objects' and Jalame Discovery
00:00:06
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:09
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:12
Speaker
In 1963, archaeologists from the Corning Museum of Glass and the University of Missouri began excavations in a place called Jalameh, what today is Israel.
00:00:22
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What they uncovered over the following eight years was an unprecedented trove of artifacts relating to the production of glass.
00:00:31
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In addition to the extraordinary artifacts and objects, this excavation was a tremendous breakthrough in our understanding of historical glassmaking and the economic and societal conditions behind the decorative arts of the late Roman Empire.
00:00:46
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And you, Lucky Curious Objects listeners, along with me, Lucky Curious Objects host, are about to get a special look at these fantastic discoveries.
Exhibition Launch: 'Dig Deeper, Discovering an Ancient Glass Workshop'
00:00:55
Speaker
Because now, after decades of research and analysis, the Corning Museum, led by curator Catherine Larson, has opened an exhibition devoted to the results of that excavation and the revelations that followed it.
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It's called Dig Deeper, Discovering an Ancient Glass Workshop.
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And I'm delighted to be in Corning and have the opportunity to speak with Catherine about the show, which includes not just artifacts uncovered in the excavation, but a deep look at the process of discovery.
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There's also a companion exhibition about the fuel and furnaces that undergirded the production at Jallame, complete with a replica of an ancient wood-fired furnace.
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There's even a comic book about the excavation.
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It's a multi-sensory experience that emphasizes the Corning Museum's dedication to hands-on interaction.
Transformative Insights from the Jalame Excavation
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And I'm thrilled to be able to share all of this with Curious Objects listeners.
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I'm particularly thrilled to do so with the guidance of Katherine Larson, the curator behind these exhibitions, who is here with me now.
00:01:53
Speaker
Katherine, could you just briefly give us a sense of how transformative this Chalmay excavation was for scholars' understanding of ancient glass production?
00:02:03
Speaker
Hi, Ben.
00:02:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's great to be here and so glad you could come out to see the exhibition.
00:02:08
Speaker
The Jolmei excavation was transformative because it was really the first scientific excavation of a glass workshop from antiquity.
00:02:19
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So at the time, 60 years ago, when they set out to do these excavations and locate the site, most of what was known about ancient glass production was known from texts.
00:02:30
Speaker
ancient sources which may or may not have been accurate, may or may not have had firsthand experience of glassmaking itself, and sort of select archaeological discoveries that had been turning up in the previous sort of half century of work, none of which were sort of found by people who knew much about glass or had set out to undertake
00:02:53
Speaker
They had different questions of what they were discovering and kind of found the glass workshops by accident.
00:02:58
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So what made the Jalame excavations so important was that they were led by people who cared about glass and wanted to know about glass.
00:03:07
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And in fact, the people involved in those excavations always said, we're not out to find beautiful objects.
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We're not out to find amazing treasures.
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We're really out to understand the way this craft worked in antiquity.
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And they were really at the cutting edge of that moment in archeology when archeologists were starting to ask more questions like that.
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It wasn't really just about finding cool stuff.
Glassmaking Techniques and Materials in Jalame
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It became much more about understanding antiquity and answering specific research questions about the way things worked in the past.
00:03:39
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So John May and that project was really the first to do it.
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And in the 60 years since, we've learned so much more.
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So the opportunity for this exhibition was really to almost revisit that site and say, how can we better understand the site
00:03:54
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with all the tools at hand today.
00:03:58
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So even though it takes our starting point in the excavations of the 1960s, we really wanted to carry that story forward and think about all that we've learned about ancient glass production since then.
00:04:11
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Great, so let's talk about what was actually happening at this site.
00:04:14
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What kinds of objects were being made at the workshop at Jell-Mate?
00:04:18
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Well, one of the things we've realized since the 60s is that the Jalame workshop is extraordinary because it was one of the few from antiquity that was both making glass from raw materials and transforming that raw glass into objects.
00:04:31
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So blowing glass, shaping glass.
00:04:34
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So they were doing both those things.
00:04:36
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So the making glass from raw ingredients, they were, it's a whole process from antiquity.
00:04:43
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And we know that this part of the world was an important center of glass production, of glass making.
00:04:50
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for a long period of time.
00:04:52
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So those, one of the things they were doing was combining sand from the nearby Bellis River, which contains a lot of silica, which is of course what most glass composition is, is silica.
00:05:05
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And they melted it at high temperatures with a mineral from Egypt called natron that was mined in a particular area called Wadi Natron.
00:05:16
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Natron was traded around the Mediterranean at this point in time.
00:05:20
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So they combined those materials at high temperatures for days, if not weeks, to
Political Influence on Jalame's Glass Industry
00:05:26
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make glass.
00:05:26
Speaker
You were just telling me earlier about natron being the origin of the Na, and we all know NaCl,
00:05:33
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chemical letters for salt.
00:05:36
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Yeah, that's your little trivia fact courtesy of the glass museum.
00:05:40
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Yeah, that's where Natron comes from.
00:05:41
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So the workshop here was active in the latter part of the fourth century.
00:05:47
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And tell me, just in broad strokes, what was the political situation?
00:05:52
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This is modern day Israel and Lebanon, this sort of regional.
00:05:58
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in the Middle East.
00:06:00
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What was happening politically in that region at this time and how would that have affected business?
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The second half of the fourth century was really a period of fragmentation throughout the Mediterranean.
00:06:13
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Rome had controlled the entire Mediterranean basin and beyond for more than 400 years at this point.
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But in what we've historically called the sort of crises of the late third century,
00:06:26
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Around 300, the Emperor Diocletian and others sort of started to divide the emperor.
00:06:31
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That huge empire, which was becoming increasingly difficult to govern and administrate, divided it into two halves, which later became the Western and Eastern Roman empires.
00:06:42
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And the Western empire went on to kind of have its own historical trajectory.
00:06:46
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And here in the east, where this workshop site was located, eventually sort of remains became the late Roman empire and eventually the Byzantine empire.
00:06:56
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So the Jalame glassworkers were actually governed not from Rome, but from the city of Constantinople, which became Istanbul in modern Turkey.
00:07:06
Speaker
Constantinople, of course, was founded by Constantine, the emperor who had died about a generation before the Jalame glassworkshop was active.
00:07:14
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And Constantine did a lot of really critical things to change the future direction and lead us into sort of the period of late antiquity, which were right at the beginning of when the Jalame workshop operated.
00:07:25
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including things like legalizing Christianity throughout the empire.
00:07:29
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So the Jalame glassworkers might have seen such things as increased pilgrims coming from various parts of the emperor through their area to make it to the holy side of Jerusalem.
00:07:40
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They were really in this moment of transition, and yet what they represent is the tradition and continuity of craft that have been active in that part of the world for hundreds of years before and would continue to be active for hundreds of years later.
00:07:55
Speaker
So there's one particular piece I want to draw listeners attention to, or really it's a category of pieces, which we're calling our curious object for today.
00:08:04
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And it's a beaker in a conical shape decorated
Daily Operations and Craftsmanship at Jalame
00:08:10
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with little blue dots.
00:08:13
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And it's sort of a surprising object to look at and very, very beautiful.
00:08:19
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And a number of these pieces are included in the exhibition.
00:08:22
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And we'll talk about the context behind those pieces.
00:08:27
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But for starters, tell me about the life cycle of these objects, starting from the very beginning, from the raw materials you were telling us about all the way through their production and use.
00:08:40
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Right.
00:08:40
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So one of the reasons I picked this object is because it is such an iconic object of the Jalame workshop.
00:08:46
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So they would have made the ingredients, like made the glass to form the object from the raw ingredients close nearby.
00:08:55
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And as you mentioned in your description that the color, there's two colors in it.
00:08:58
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So most of what the Jalame workshop was producing was monochrome utilitarian pieces.
00:09:04
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And then they made a few pieces that have richer colors.
00:09:09
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So this particular object was likely decolorized.
00:09:14
Speaker
So the main body of it is colorless, which is actually not.
00:09:18
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A lot of people think that glass is naturally colorless.
00:09:20
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It's not true.
00:09:21
Speaker
If you actually look at a thicker piece of glass, like a window glass, you'll see that it has a little bit of a blue or a green tinge that's due to the iron in the sand.
00:09:30
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So the glassmakers would have added...
00:09:34
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manganese to the glass batch to actually decolorize it to give it like to take away that counteract that iron impurity and to get those blue dots they added copper to the glass to give it that really rich dark blue color to make those dots
00:09:51
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And then they would have shaped it into that conical form.
00:09:55
Speaker
We're not exactly sure how they, there's a couple ways they can make that form.
00:09:58
Speaker
Glass kind of wants to take on that elongated shape when it's hot.
00:10:02
Speaker
They may have made it with the aid of a mold that you drop, suspend the molten glass into a really simple conical mold, or it could have just swung it around sort of freehand to elongate that shape.
00:10:15
Speaker
Then the vessel was cooled or annealed.
00:10:18
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Glass is subject to thermal stress, so it has to cool slowly, perhaps buried in an insulating material like olive pits or in a smaller secondary furnace that was kept at a lower temperature and cooled down overnight.
00:10:35
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And then after it was cooled, what makes this object really interesting, and it's a technique that's used widely in ancient glass production, is that instead of sort of finishing the rim while the vessel's hot, they used a cold working technique to finish the rim.
00:10:49
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That is, we archaeologists call cracking off.
00:10:53
Speaker
Modern glass artists call it hot popping because they use thermo, which is sort of a funny term.
00:11:00
Speaker
They use, they take advantage.
00:11:02
Speaker
So if you can imagine the glass kind of broke off the end of the blowpipe, it's cooled.
00:11:06
Speaker
It's still got almost a lid on the top.
00:11:09
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It's not open at the top at this point in time.
00:11:12
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So to get that opening, you apply thermal stress to the glass.
00:11:18
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Today's glassmakers use a blowtorch to do that.
00:11:20
Speaker
They do a light score to kind of create a line that they want it to break along, then apply a blowtorch to add heat to it.
00:11:27
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And eventually it pops off due to that thermal pressure.
00:11:31
Speaker
Of course, they don't have blowtorch.
00:11:34
Speaker
tarches in antiquities.
00:11:37
Speaker
So we've been, like, archaeologists have been trying to figure out for decades and working with current, like, with modern craftsmen and modern glass artists to figure out how this could have been done.
00:11:45
Speaker
And there's a few methods.
00:11:46
Speaker
One is to submerge half and half in hot and cold water.
00:11:50
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If you've seen kind of wine bottle breaking, sometimes it's the same kind of principle.
00:11:55
Speaker
But another one that we were able to pull off for the exhibition that we were able to film and we played the video in the exhibition is wrapping a hot...
00:12:03
Speaker
string of glass, of molten glass, around that edge of the vessel to give it that thermal shock.
00:12:11
Speaker
And then a light tap will just crack off the top.
00:12:15
Speaker
And if you can do it well, which it takes a little bit of skill, you end up with a really nice, clean edge.
Target Audience for Jalame's Glassware
00:12:22
Speaker
So who were the craftspeople working in this workshop at Chalamet?
00:12:28
Speaker
And what do we know about them?
00:12:30
Speaker
Were they very well off?
00:12:32
Speaker
We don't know a lot.
00:12:33
Speaker
And most of what we know is, or think we know, or think we might know is due to comparative evidence from other traditional glass workshops.
00:12:41
Speaker
So we don't know some really simple questions, like how many people would have worked there.
00:12:47
Speaker
I'd say it's anywhere perhaps between three and 30.
00:12:50
Speaker
So not a huge workshop, not an industrial workshop.
00:12:53
Speaker
Um,
00:12:55
Speaker
We don't know the relationship between those people.
00:12:57
Speaker
We don't know if they were family relationships that were passed down with the knowledge passed down over time, or if they were relationships of a master and enslaved person.
00:13:11
Speaker
relationship that the knowledge was passed that way and or through a more apprentice system or some combination thereof.
00:13:19
Speaker
Unfortunately, we just don't have that kind of documentation from antiquity.
00:13:24
Speaker
But we do know that the glass workshop, this Jolimai glass workshop was short lived.
00:13:29
Speaker
We know through ceramic evidence and coin evidence that it probably didn't operate for more than 10 or 15 years at the very most.
00:13:38
Speaker
And since the Jalamey excavations, we've found dozens of other glass workshops in the same part of the world.
00:13:45
Speaker
Of course, we know this is an important glass making area in antiquity.
00:13:48
Speaker
But what we think is happening is that the glass workers are moving around, probably following fuel sources throughout the
00:13:57
Speaker
just basically down the road to get to new fuel sources to be able to exploit.
00:14:03
Speaker
So there's some kind of continuative tradition that extends over a long period of time, but the mechanisms for that we don't know a lot about right now.
00:14:10
Speaker
What do we know about the supply chain for bringing the raw materials for this production and the fuel, all the necessaries to the workshop itself?
00:14:20
Speaker
So Natron would have had to come up from Egypt, of course.
00:14:24
Speaker
And because it was actually a widely traded good in antiquity, it wasn't just used for glass production.
00:14:33
Speaker
We glass people like to think it's the most important thing for us.
00:14:37
Speaker
But in fact, even dating back to the first millennium BCE, it's used as a preservative.
00:14:42
Speaker
It was used in mummification.
00:14:43
Speaker
It was used because it's sodium, basically.
00:14:46
Speaker
So it's used the same way that salts are used today.
00:14:50
Speaker
So it was actually a widely traded good and probably came up with merchants and then was purchased by the local glassworkers.
00:14:57
Speaker
They probably mined their own sand from right nearby.
00:15:00
Speaker
And that was that concentration of the great sand, which contained the right amounts of silica, as well as probably limestone.
00:15:11
Speaker
That is what makes glass stable so that they could get away with just making glass from two ingredients and didn't have to do a lot of cleaning of the sand to make it a good material for glass making.
00:15:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:25
Speaker
So is that what makes this region so important for glass production in the period, the availability of those resources?
00:15:31
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:15:32
Speaker
And in fact, later on in antiquity, when people, as we talked a little bit about the political history and the decline of the trade routes, even connecting east and western halves of the Roman Empire, as glass from the
00:15:49
Speaker
the Levant from the area that's now Israel and Lebanon, went as far as Britain in antiquity and in the peak of the Roman period, supported by those Roman supply chains and trade networks.
00:16:00
Speaker
And then throughout late antiquity, as those trade networks start to deteriorate, we see that glass is not reaching Western Europe in nearly the same amounts and really declines.
00:16:10
Speaker
And they're forced to just recycle glass that's found in
00:16:14
Speaker
nearby or recycle earlier glass and not be able to bring in the new glass.
00:16:19
Speaker
And it continues throughout the into the Venetian period where the Venice is bringing in raw materials actually from the Islamic world, from the exact same part of the world we're talking about today to supply their glass houses during the Renaissance.
00:16:32
Speaker
A thousand years later.
00:16:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:34
Speaker
So getting back to the production process, can you just explain for us the difference between primary and secondary glass making?
00:16:43
Speaker
Sure, so primary glass making is the process of actually using glass from the raw ingredients of sand and natron in this case.
00:16:53
Speaker
So your silica source and your sodium source.
00:16:56
Speaker
And then sometimes you might put in something like lime as a stabler, your colorants as well.
00:17:00
Speaker
Secondary glass making is the process of transforming that raw glass into finished objects.
00:17:08
Speaker
So raw glass from primary workshops which were concentrated in Egypt and the Levant throughout much of antiquity was traded broadly.
00:17:18
Speaker
Secondary glass blowing workshops were located throughout the empire and its vestiges.
00:17:25
Speaker
because it's of course a lot easier to trade a big chunk of raw glass than it is to transport a nice finished glass vessel.
00:17:33
Speaker
As anyone with kids can tell you.
00:17:36
Speaker
Yeah, the packing of glass before the styrofoam and bubble wrap was a little bit tricky.
00:17:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:42
Speaker
Straw and other things.
00:17:42
Speaker
But imagine transporting a really beautiful glass piece by donkey or ship over long distances.
00:17:48
Speaker
So that's one of the reasons that most cities would have had a glass blowing workshop.
00:17:53
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:17:54
Speaker
But at John Lame, they were doing both.
00:17:56
Speaker
They were doing both.
00:17:57
Speaker
So that's one of the things that's really interesting about that site is that they're making those glass from Iran ingredients, but they're also blowing glass to provide local supply, local markets for those local household consumer goods that middle-class folks, they weren't really making luxury high-end wares for the emperor and the elites of society.
00:18:23
Speaker
They were making...
00:18:25
Speaker
things for daily use.
00:18:27
Speaker
Yeah, so I want to talk about that a little more in the context of these conical beakers, which were made with experience and care.
00:18:38
Speaker
But you're saying that the buyers for these objects were not talking about the upper crust in society necessarily.
00:18:45
Speaker
Tell me more about who the target audience was for a workshop like Jell-Amé.
00:18:51
Speaker
They would have been primarily selling to people like merchants, small-scale farmers and landowners, retired soldiers, formerly enslaved people.
Dual Purposes of Conical Beakers
00:19:04
Speaker
There's a lot of discussion about what a Roman middle class would have looked like, sort of the people between the peasants and the high end.
00:19:13
Speaker
But it's clear that one of the things that made the Roman Empire successful is that they were able to support
00:19:19
Speaker
this sort of mid-tier of society.
00:19:21
Speaker
And those are really the people who were able to buy ancient glass, like the types of vessels that were made at the Jalame workshop.
00:19:29
Speaker
And we know from excavating towns, villages, farmsteads, that glass was really common in these areas and is discarded quite regularly.
00:19:41
Speaker
It wasn't guarded like a precious object.
00:19:44
Speaker
Right.
00:19:44
Speaker
So these weren't necessarily family heirlooms that you would have tried to, you know, gone to some lengths to maintain for your children and grandchildren and so on.
00:19:54
Speaker
Maybe they're, I mean, what would be the analogy in contemporary use?
00:19:58
Speaker
It's more like the, you know, the pieces you just have in your cabinet.
00:20:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's like your day, like what you eat dinner on every day.
00:20:05
Speaker
You know, it's an interesting, I did a project, we have very limited knowledge about what
00:20:14
Speaker
the cost of glass was in antiquity.
00:20:16
Speaker
In fact, the only real document we have is known as Diocletian's Price Edict that dates to that period around 300, I think 304 is the exact year.
00:20:25
Speaker
So Diocletian is the one who divided the empire into two parts.
00:20:30
Speaker
One of the things he did to kind of increase stability was set a price list because there was rampant inflation.
00:20:35
Speaker
And so he said, okay, here's the maximum prices that you can charge for things, including glass.
00:20:41
Speaker
We, of course, don't really know how closely that edict was followed, but it's one of the bench posts we have.
00:20:47
Speaker
So some people have gone through and kind of calculated based on that, like how much glass would have cost and extrapolated at today's dollars, like a glass average glass vest, like the ones made at Jolomé probably would cost about 30 or $35.
00:21:01
Speaker
So, you know, it's not...
00:21:06
Speaker
not the most precious thing it's not the least precious thing it's somewhere sort of in the middle and we do see that they would have been valued in some way because a lot of glass is deposited in burials um in this part of the world in particular that it's part of those burial goods that accompany you into the afterlife yeah
00:21:29
Speaker
So tell me a little more about this, the distribution of used goods.
00:21:35
Speaker
So we have a workshop that's both taking raw materials and making glass out of it, and then is also taking that glass and forming it into consumer goods.
00:21:45
Speaker
And all that's happening within one site, presumably operated by the same person or group of people.
00:21:54
Speaker
After the production of the consumer goods, is there a gift shop at the workshop?
00:21:59
Speaker
How do these items, are there merchants, are there retailers?
00:22:03
Speaker
How do these eventually make their way into consumers' hands?
00:22:07
Speaker
That's a great question.
00:22:09
Speaker
And we don't know specifically about the Jollinay workshop.
00:22:12
Speaker
When they excavated it back in the 1960s, a lot of, they found a sort of high temperature area where they think the glass was fused.
00:22:21
Speaker
But then that workshop was basically leveled by later occupation and all the glass refuse was dumped over the side of the hill.
00:22:32
Speaker
So that's what the archeologists found later.
00:22:34
Speaker
From other sites, we know that glass could have been sold in urban areas right next to the glass workshop.
00:22:42
Speaker
So there's a workshop from...
00:22:48
Speaker
Beit Shion, which is also in modern Israel, so not all that far away from the Dhalame workshop, was destroyed by an earthquake.
00:22:56
Speaker
And in that workshop, it's clear they were making glass, blowing glass, and then selling it right nearby.
00:23:02
Speaker
There's glass on shelves that have basically kind of fallen down in that earthquake.
00:23:06
Speaker
But Dallame was probably a semi-rural area, so it would have been merchants who came through, maybe picked up those glass-eyed donkeys and sold it out to markets.
00:23:19
Speaker
And these beakers we've been talking about, these conical beakers, once they did make it into consumers' hands, what were they actually used for?
00:23:27
Speaker
They're not very practical for sort of sitting down at the table at dinner.
00:23:31
Speaker
They're conical.
00:23:33
Speaker
They won't stand up on their own.
00:23:35
Speaker
What were they actually used for?
00:23:37
Speaker
We're lucky with the conical beakers in that it's one of the few forms of glass from antiquity that we actually have pretty good iconographic evidence for how they would have been used.
00:23:48
Speaker
So there's two threads to this.
00:23:50
Speaker
That is why I say they're probably used for both lighting and for drinking.
00:23:56
Speaker
So one of the pieces of evidence that we have that they were used for lighting is a mosaic, which is a floor mosaic from a synagogue in Tiberias, which is not also in modern Israel and not that far away from Jalameh.
00:24:09
Speaker
So this floor mosaic from Tiberius shows conical, clearly glass because they're transparent, conical beakers, just like the one that we're talking about today, set as lights in a menorah.
00:24:22
Speaker
And you can see the little flames coming out of them.
00:24:26
Speaker
So it's the lit menorah.
00:24:27
Speaker
So they're ambiguous.
00:24:28
Speaker
Yeah, right, right.
00:24:29
Speaker
Clearly used for lighting.
00:24:31
Speaker
They would have been filled with oil and that would have burned.
00:24:33
Speaker
And in fact, the fourth century is right when we see the beginnings of glass used as lighting, the light churches and sacred spaces as well as homes.
00:24:43
Speaker
So the conical beakers are one of the first pieces of glass that are unequivocally used in this way.
00:24:48
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:24:49
Speaker
And yet we also have a wall painting from Ostia outside of Rome that shows the exact same form of conical, clearly glass, clearly transparent objects that there's a set of clearly kind of Roman gentlemen with names who are toasting each other with these glasses.
Workshop Dynamics and Relocation
00:25:08
Speaker
So they're clearly using them for drinking.
00:25:11
Speaker
I hope they washed them first.
00:25:13
Speaker
Before the light, yeah, between the lighting.
00:25:16
Speaker
You know, I always say that it's really, there's so many of these drinking vessels from glass drinking vessels from antiquity that have these rounded bases on the bottom.
00:25:25
Speaker
I always say if I could travel back in time for like five minutes and solve one question, it would be how these things were used because it's so different from how we think about drinking cups today that we always have to set them down flat on a table.
00:25:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting to think about.
00:25:42
Speaker
And the fact that there are actually visual depictions of them from antiquity, you know, it helps with the speculation because it limits the range of possibilities.
00:25:52
Speaker
Boy, it does seem unorthodox.
00:25:56
Speaker
It's not what we would think of as a drinking vessel today.
00:26:00
Speaker
So it invites sort of your imagination to think about, you know, what that reflected about the way these people were going through their daily lives.
00:26:09
Speaker
It's always a good reminder that the past is not what you expect.
00:26:15
Speaker
And there are things that are so different about what we sort of take for granted today that weren't always true in the way people lived in the past.
00:26:24
Speaker
So were any of you speakers found intact on site at Jell-A-M-A?
00:26:29
Speaker
No, just fragments.
00:26:31
Speaker
And we've got waste materials and other things that are what tell us that the beakers like this were made on site, little tiny fragments.
00:26:40
Speaker
They're really nice archaeologically because those blue dots are very diagnostic.
00:26:45
Speaker
It's
00:26:46
Speaker
unequivocal when you find one of those things what it belonged to.
00:26:49
Speaker
So there's no intact ones that were found at Jolame, but they're found throughout the region, including in museum collections like ours.
00:26:55
Speaker
So actually sort of feature object that we're looking at today is actually from our collection.
00:27:00
Speaker
So a lot of these pieces ended up in museum collections because they had been included in burials and it made it into the antiquities market in the early 20th century.
00:27:10
Speaker
And were there any other intact pieces at Jolame?
00:27:13
Speaker
Just one tiny little bottle, not even bottle, like little jar is really the best way to describe it.
00:27:21
Speaker
It was the only intact piece.
00:27:23
Speaker
Because of course we talked about they would have all the nice completed pieces were sold or sent away.
00:27:31
Speaker
So probably what we're getting are the broken pieces, the wasters, the things that failed and then are eventually discarded on the site.
00:27:39
Speaker
So I want to work our way toward the waning days, the waning years or days of the operation of this workshop and what happened as it started to shut down.
00:27:49
Speaker
And I think to do that, we need to talk about the furnace, where they actually produced the heat for all of this glassmaking work.
00:27:57
Speaker
What was this furnace like and how did they keep it fueled?
00:28:02
Speaker
Well, they never found remains of a glass furnace, like a glass blowing furnace at Jolomey.
00:28:08
Speaker
In fact, it was one of the big questions that the archeologists had in the 1960s was they'd found this high heat area and they couldn't quite figure out how it would have worked as a glass blowing furnace.
00:28:21
Speaker
So for the evidence for this, we have to turn to other sites that have been found subsequently.
00:28:26
Speaker
And likely it would have been a either a round furnace, a keyhole shaped furnace or a small rectangular furnace.
00:28:34
Speaker
Not very big, probably enough for at most two or three glass blowers to sit around and work around.
00:28:44
Speaker
And it would have been made from a semi-organic material like a mud brick or a daub, which is made from sort of refired ceramic, straw, and organic materials that are combined together.
00:28:56
Speaker
And it's a really common building material in antiquity used to make all kinds of things.
00:29:01
Speaker
Our team here in Corning has actually tried our hand at making one of these things and found that the daub management was actually the hardest part of it.
00:29:12
Speaker
And they were fueled by wood.
00:29:14
Speaker
So the furnaces were primarily fueled by wood, maybe olive pits and other material as well.
00:29:19
Speaker
They didn't have to go get coal or charcoal to create these.
00:29:26
Speaker
But that wood fuel was really a huge driving economic factor of where these furnaces were located and the lifespan they had.
00:29:35
Speaker
even materials of sand and natron are not used in nearly the same volume as that wood was necessary to keep these furnaces at a high enough temperature to melt glass over the period of time that it took to produce objects.
00:29:51
Speaker
So what, they deforested the area for as far from the workshop as was practical and then closed up and moved to the next patch of woods?
00:30:00
Speaker
Yeah, essentially that's what we think.
00:30:01
Speaker
So we've seen the John LeMay workshop probably didn't operate for more than 10 or 15 years.
00:30:06
Speaker
And all these other dozens of workshops that we found seem to follow the same direction.
00:30:10
Speaker
period span of occupation that none of them operated for a very long time.
00:30:15
Speaker
And so that's exactly what we think is that they had to keep moving in order to follow the fuel sources and let the forests regenerate before they were able to come back and exploit those same forests again.
00:30:27
Speaker
Right.
00:30:27
Speaker
And I understand that there were no glass making tools found at this site, which is maybe a further indication that this wasn't just a business shutting down and
00:30:37
Speaker
leaving the detritus behind, this was a business moving along to the next location.
Societal Impact of Jalame's Glass Production
00:30:43
Speaker
Right, exactly.
00:30:45
Speaker
So I think it's clear enough that the Jalme excavation revealed a great deal of information about the process of glassmaking in the period.
00:30:55
Speaker
But what did that excavation teach and what is it continuing to teach us about society and culture and the daily life of the people around this workshop?
00:31:08
Speaker
Well, one of the things that it teaches us is that glass was really a common material that was available for a wide segment of society, that there was a market for these daily household wares that could be sustained globally.
00:31:27
Speaker
locally.
00:31:28
Speaker
It also tells us a lot about the trade and the economic environment at this particular juncture in time of this kind of key transitional moment in Mediterranean history from the sort of dominance of the Roman Empire to the sort of decline of these trade networks and the shrinking of the areas of influence in terms of where the Jalame glass was reaching.
00:31:55
Speaker
There's a lot of really great, exciting work that's coming out of the scientific community in terms of looking at provenance origins of where this class is coming from.
00:32:05
Speaker
Tell me a little about the background behind this exhibition and where the material is drawn from and how has the Israeli Antiquities Authority been involved in that?
00:32:18
Speaker
A lot of the material from the excavation was brought back to Corning in the 1960s by our chief scientist at the time, Dr. Robert Brill.
00:32:26
Speaker
Brill had all these questions about how glass was made that he wanted to answer using scientific techniques.
00:32:32
Speaker
So all the things that I talked about, about the sand and the natron, those were all really demonstrated and proved by Brill for the first time.
00:32:39
Speaker
So Brill had all these questions and he brought a lot of this material back to Corning from Israel in the 1960s.
00:32:47
Speaker
And when I started work at Corning in 2016, as an ancient glass specialist who had learned about the Jolomé workshop in the course of my studies, I was so excited to see this material for the first time and thought this was really, this could be a really great exhibition that celebrates the discoveries from this workshop.
00:33:05
Speaker
So that was where that sort of came from.
00:33:08
Speaker
The exhibition has also given us the opportunity to work directly with the Israel Antiquities Authority to work on getting those objects back to Israel.
00:33:20
Speaker
They always came here, even when Brill brought them in the 60s, was never intended to be permanent.
00:33:26
Speaker
And so we've built up that relationship with the Israel Antiquities Authority in hopes to be able to send those pieces back.
00:33:34
Speaker
And to start to build that relationship, we're actually able to borrow quite a few materials from the IAA to support the exhibition.
Modern Recreation of Ancient Techniques
00:33:42
Speaker
So materials from the site itself, as well as from other excavations in the region, that when paired with materials from our collection, we're able to really tell this holistic story about glass production in this part of the world at that time.
00:34:02
Speaker
What you're hearing now is the sounds of the replica furnace that the Corning glassmakers constructed according to ancient designs and materials.
00:34:12
Speaker
One of the unique things about the Corning Museum is the presence of working craftspeople, experts in glassblowing, who have unique insights into the work of ancient glassmakers.
00:34:23
Speaker
After all, as one of Corning's craftspeople told me, if you could take an ancient glassmaker from Jalame and teleport them to today's Corning Museum 2,000 years later, they could sit down at the bench and make glass in pretty much the exact same way.
00:34:39
Speaker
The core process was so effective, it really hasn't had to change very much.
00:34:45
Speaker
And that gave Katherine Larson an opportunity that few curators have to learn about the historic craft behind the works they study from people who are actually practicing that craft today.
00:35:04
Speaker
I'm interested in, you've mentioned at a couple of points, the work that you've done with craftspeople today to recreate an ancient furnace and recreate some of these glassblowing techniques.
00:35:19
Speaker
What have you learned through collaboration with these people?
00:35:22
Speaker
I mean, it's one of the interesting things I think about the Corning Museum is how it brings together history and research and craft.
00:35:31
Speaker
all in the same place.
00:35:32
Speaker
What fruit has that borne in terms of the Jalame excavation?
00:35:37
Speaker
I think it's one of the things that makes ancient glass studies really special is the willingness of glass archaeologists and contemporary glass makers, glass blowers, who care about the history of their craft
00:35:53
Speaker
for archaeologists and glass artists to work together to answer some of these key questions.
00:35:59
Speaker
And you really learn by doing, right, through this process of experimental archaeology.
00:36:04
Speaker
So Corning's built this wood-fired furnace replica that we're not the first to do something like this, but we're some of the first to be able to demonstrate it publicly in the United States.
00:36:14
Speaker
We've got a great series of demonstrations happening this summer.
00:36:18
Speaker
And we've really learned that even though the process of what happens at the end of the blowpipe is largely unchanged and our glassmakers can replicate those pieces really quite easily, the whole environment of that ancient workshop is quite different from what you see in a modern contemporary glassblowing environment.
00:36:39
Speaker
those small scale wood furnaces, the fact that you would have used the same furnace to heat the glass and reheat the glass and shape the glass.
00:36:49
Speaker
And even that you would have been in a seated position in front of one of these small scale furnaces rather than moving around a lot more actively.
00:36:58
Speaker
And you can, you really develop a different relationship with the material watch aid in those ways and also appreciation for the fact that you can't just turn a knob and get your natural gas at the exact right level to get dial in your temperature to exactly 2053 degrees.
00:37:16
Speaker
You have to work closely with the person, an individual who is stoking the furnace, who's giving all that wood into the furnace properly.
00:37:23
Speaker
the dial in the right level of heat to do what you want to do.
00:37:26
Speaker
So it's a much more dynamic process and you have a really different relationship with the material.
00:37:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:32
Speaker
I think about that often with silversmithing in the 17th, 18th century is when
00:37:39
Speaker
Applying the correct solder means getting a very specific temperature.
00:37:42
Speaker
And of course, there is no thermometer to tell you when you've arrived at that temperature, you have to judge it by looking at the color of the metal.
00:37:51
Speaker
It's this incredibly sensitive and subtle skill.
00:37:55
Speaker
I imagine that these class makers had a sort of similar skill set in their repertoire.
00:38:01
Speaker
That's a really interesting parallel.
00:38:04
Speaker
We have been a little bit of slaves to our little thermocouple to see what the temperatures the furnace is at.
00:38:11
Speaker
And when I took my turn stoking the furnace last summer, I'd kind of rely on looking at that, oh, the temperature is inching down, time to add more wood.
00:38:21
Speaker
But folks who have been working at these furnaces, these wood replica style wood furnaces for a long time, say that I've done exactly what you said.
00:38:28
Speaker
They hardly use their thermometers anymore.
00:38:31
Speaker
They really are responding to the material instead of using the modern tools.
00:38:36
Speaker
And it's just training yourself to work in a different way than we're used to working as people in the 21st century.
Conclusion and Exhibition Invitation
00:38:44
Speaker
Well, I'm excited to go see this all for myself.
00:38:47
Speaker
Thanks so much for the insight, Catherine Larson.
00:38:49
Speaker
And I hope listeners will come and see the show for themselves.
00:38:53
Speaker
Me too.
00:38:53
Speaker
Thanks for being here, Ben.
00:38:56
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta.
00:39:02
Speaker
Sierra Holt is our digital media assistant.
00:39:04
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:39:06
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.