Vessel Glass

A landmark in the study of ancient glass from Greece, this volume presents 404 vessels, mostly fragmentary, excavated in the Athenian Agora. Fragments of almost every type of glass known from antiquity were found: 37 pieces date to the Classical and Hellenistic periods, when the Agora as civil center of the city was at its height, and 15 are assigned to the ninth to eighteenth centuries. The bulk of the material belongs to the Roman Empire and Late Antiquity. In these periods, glass was a common material in the market place and household, and it was used side by side with ceramics and metals with which it competed as tableware and as containers. Excavated to exacting scientific standards, much of the material comes from independently datable contexts. The glass offers a significant contribution to our assessment of the trade and economy of Athens after the city had lost its status of foremost city in Greece but was still an important industrial centre. The volume provides an overview of the history of glass manufacturing techniques as evidenced within the city of Athens followed by a discussion of the contexts in which the objects were deposited. The discussions of the finds, by period and by shape, are interleafed with the catalogue entries proper. Figures, plates (some in color), an extensive bibliography, deposit summaries, concordances, and indices complete the book. The first excavation monograph from Greece to present the glass from all periods of the history of one site, this volume will be an essential reference work for archaeologists and glass historians alike.