Abstract
Archaeological excavation on the site of a seventeenth-century coal-fired glasshouse at Vauxhall, London, recovered a quantity of opaque, light purple to pale blue/green material. Although the material itself was highly crystalline, the bulk composition matched samples of the transparent, pale-green glass made at the glasshouse, confirming that it was glassworking waste of some kind. The material was reported as frit (Tyler and Wilmott 2005) but alternative interpretations have also been proposed (Dungworth 2007). The authors therefore examined samples of the material with a scanning electron microscope (Fig.1) but the conclusive identification of the material was hindered by uncertainty about what frit should look like, particularly after being buried for hundreds of years.
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Paynter, S., Dungworth, D. (2011). Recognising Frit: Experiments Reproducing Post-Medieval Plant Ash Glass. In: Turbanti-Memmi, I. (eds) Proceedings of the 37th International Symposium on Archaeometry, 13th - 16th May 2008, Siena, Italy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14678-7_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14678-7_19
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