Iron Age glass-working in Moravia, Central Europe: new archaeometric research on raw glass and waste-3rd-first century BC

Finds of raw glass and waste from two La Tene glass-working sites, the settlement agglomeration of Nemcice dating to the 3rd-second century BC and the Stare Hradisko oppidum from the 2nd-first century BC, are analysed by LA-ICP-MS. The analysis results of a series of 60 samples are compared with the corpus of 1194 analysed glass artefacts from France. A concurrence was found with the composition of Celtic and Hellenistic glass artefacts. Five compositional groups of natron glass were distinguished based on major, minor and trace elements: two groups correspond to Egyptian glass, the other three to Levantine glass. The similarity of the compositions recorded in Western and Central Europe shows that a European-wide network for the imported raw glass can be anticipated. The observation of the waste found at the Nemcice site in the light of the experiments carried out with the skills of the La Tene glass masters introduces new elements into the progressive reconstruction of the organisation of glass-working.