Roman glass I

Ohhh! Just the summer… We´re great, we have not had a holiday but not complain :). And our blog have diminished, because we were up above. But we return today to make the day more enjoyable to you are working and entertain which is resting.

Today we will tell you a restoration that I did some time ago. It’s an archaeological piece that was part of a funerary regalia found in a Roman burial in Villalba de los Barros (Badajoz). The excavation was carried out by the company TERA SL and the restoration I loved it. The regalia was composed of six parts: three dishes of Terra sigillata (tableware), a ceramic thin walls with remains of slip, a common ceramic jug and a glass jar. In the photo you can see the regalia at the time of the excavation, when it appears. The arrow tells you which is the piece of glass.

Another day we will tell you the process of restoration of the rest of pieces, but today we are going to give way to the piece of glass, it is also my favorite material and which at the time gave me many headaches. Fortunately, the final result was very good.

The piece as you can imagine, by the type of material that is (especially Roman glass is more fragile because it has a few millimeters thick, it’s not like the glass that manufactured today logically) and being buried, appeared fragmented into a thousand pieces, some tiny and the only thing that remained in large fragments was part of the mouthneck and handle of the jar. This make difficult us Assembly and bonding of the object. I show you a picture so that you see that we are talking about. Luckily the piece, despite being fragmented, retained the original form thanks to the land containing the jar and this helped us to guide us in the assembly.

I tell you the treatment from the beginning. First thing we did was to photograph and document so you don’t miss a detail. Then we turn to remove fragments of the ball land that you see in the picture to start the cleaning.

The cleaning process was simple in this case because the material is well conserved, i.e. there scales and also a large amount of insoluble salts, only in the area of the rim of the jar. So we clean each piece of the piece with distilled water and a neutral SOAP, patience.

Clean once we started to discover information than ever before rather than we saw with the attached earth, as some defectillos of the manufacturing process. Bubbles, lines of blowing and alterations that were not before visible beneath the Earth.

This cleaning our favor has well diagnose in alteration process and make a good proposal for treatment and mounting.

The next step was to lower the insoluble salts, but this reserved it for the following input for not to be so heavy!