What The Present Can-And Can’t-Tell Us About Ancient Glass Production

Having begun my career in contemporary hot glass, I entered the field of archaeological glass understanding a very particular Euro-American way of working with the material. That lens was in place when I worked on glass from the archaeological sites of Sepphoris and Khirbet Qana in northern Israel in the 1990s. I came to realize that my perspective as a glassmaker was limiting and even inaccurate for understanding glassworking in antiquity. To understand alternative ways of working with glass, I undertook ethnoarchaeological research with glassworkers in Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, and Syria. In addition to describing the field of ethnoarchaeology, this paper considers what research with contemporary artists can tell us about the past. It also highlights the limitations and potential pitfalls of this research methodology.
Speaker: Alysia Fischer, University of South Carolina (United States)