Today, we consider glass an every-day material, barely notice it until it breaks, and don’t think much about where it comes from. This talk will present the outline of this major industry during the 1st millennium CE, across the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and well beyond. I will start with a brief summary of glassmaking practices and the way how production regions shifted over the course of the centuries between northern Egypt and the Syro-Palestine region, sketching out our current understanding of the production, distribution and recycling of glass.
Thilo Rehren is an Earth Scientist by training, specialising on high-temperature processes such as magma formation beneath volcanoes, slag formation in metallurgical furnaces, and glass making in crucibles. All these involve silica-based melt systems in the temperature range of 800 to 1300C, enabling transfer of analytical and conceptual models between the different disciplines.
From 1990 to 1999 Thilo worked as a Research Scientist at the German Mining Museum, helping to establish the newly-founded Institute for Archaeometallurgy. In 1999 he was appointed to the Chair in Archaeological Materials and Technologies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, establishing a new MSc in Technology and Analysis of Archaeological Materials, and expanding the doctoral research group there from c 3 to c 15 PhD students at any one time.
From 2011 to 2016 he was seconded to lead the establishment of UCL Qatar as its founding director, including setting up a teaching laboratory for the new MSc in Conservation Studies and a research laboratory for Archaeological Materials Science, and overseeing the establishment of a new MA in Islamic Archaeology and an MA in Museum and Gallery Practice. Since 2017 he leads STARC, the Science and Technology in Archaeology and Culture Research Center.
When Thursday, 22 July at 8.30 pm
Where Amphitheatre Costas Stefanis, The Cyprus Institute, Aglantzia
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The webinar will be in English and the live stream is open to the public