An Exploration of Middlebury’s Ancient Glass Collection

by Eloise McFarlane ’24.5

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Introduction

The Middlebury College Museum of Art holds a sizable collection of ancient glass, replete with a variety of common yet remarkable objects. The collection is rooted within rich historical and cultural grounds and provides significant value as a teaching tool to our institution. This blog post details sections of my thesis, A Catalog and Exploration of Middlebury’s Ancient Glass Collection, which was completed in Fall 2023.

Chronologically, the collection contains pieces created during the Roman Empire, from around the first to the fourth centuries CE, as well as others of Islamic origin, made much later, between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. Geographically, the collection reaches from the island of Cyprus to the entire Eastern Mediterranean regions, highlighting the ways in which glass provides evidence for cross-cultural connection, exchange, and community. It is likely that the pieces found in Cyprus are original to that area: while raw glass ingots were often traded over great distances amongst Mediterranean cities and their glass workshops, finished glass pieces were seldom transported over long distances because of their fragility.¹ Glass vessels thus have the capacity to provide a firsthand look into local ancient life, practices, and customs. Tangible, interdisciplinary, and inclusive teaching tools like Middlebury’s glass collection lie at the heart of art historical studies as they equip students with a lens through which social, political, and historical knowledge can be internalized.

The collection counts a total of sixty-nine individual pieces. It is replete with perfume bottles, unguentaria (the term for ancient Roman cosmetic bottles), tableware, flasks, and various other adornment pieces and fragments, including twenty-eight beads, all of which demonstrate the sophistication of ancient glass and the various techniques used for glass creation. Overall, the glass objects, as works of art, exhibit meticulous craftsmanship and trigger awe through their material’s iridescence and marvelous array of color, offering a material look into the ancient world through their shapes and functions.

History of the Collection

Middlebury’s ancient glass collection was built over some seventy years in four phases, beginning in 1953. The first sixteen of the glass pieces, primarily Cypriot unguentaria, were donated in 1953 by Karl Twitchell, a Vermont-born mining engineer who received an honorary Doctor of Science from Middlebury College in 1950.² The ancient glass objects from Twitchell were part of a group of artifacts that he had collected throughout his travels to Cyprus between 1937 and 1947.³ In addition to these Cypriot glass pieces, Twitchell brought back artifacts from his travels and experiences in Saudi Arabia, where he spent his career as a mining engineer.⁴ In a Middlebury Campus article from December 1953, student journalist Sally Evans details the pieces donated in the Twitchell collection, though referring only to the non-glass artifacts that he gifted to the college. A selection of these pieces were first displayed in a case at Starr Library, the college’s library at the time, for educational purposes because at the time Middlebury did not have a museum. These objects included a beak-spouted ewer, a dagger, pistols, and flower holders. Many of these objects were later displayed in the so-called “Saudi Arabia Room” in the old Starr Library.⁵

In her article, Sally Evans describes Twitchell as a “native Vermonter” who had become a successful mining engineer in the Middle East. He lived and worked in Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Cyprus. The Los Angeles County Museum⁶ housed his collection of ancient and Near Eastern objects until August 1952, at which time it was relocated to Middlebury in the wake of having received his honorary degree.⁷ The Twitchell collection includes several unguentaria, bottles, jugs, and jars, all of which will be detailed in the glass catalog in Chapter Four. Given the pristine condition of the Twitchell glass objects, it is likely (though not known) that virtually all of them came out of ancient tombs, where they had been deposited as tomb gifts. That is the case with the vast bulk of Cypriot archaeological material.⁸

A second set of ancient glass in Middlebury’s collection was donated by Robert Youngman and his wife Barbara. Youngman, who worked in the finance industry for the majority of his life, graduated from Middlebury College in 1964 with a major in Political Science. He served as the chair of the Middlebury Board of Trustees from 1993 to 1995. In 1996, he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree. The Youngmans donated several Ancient Roman, Islamic, and Syrian glass artifacts to the Middlebury College Museum of Art. As longtime lovers of Asian arts specifically, both Youngman and his wife established endowed funds that were allocated towards purchasing Asian art for the museum, funding student internships and cataloging pieces. Youngman took pride in investing in and exploring “the extracurricular aspects of life,” illustrating the motive behind his deep adoration for the arts and the Middlebury Museum.⁹ Youngman’s donation consists of twenty-eight glass beads, three Islamic cosmetic bottles, and a singular fragment of glass. This gift has expanded and diversified Middlebury’s glass collection geographically (to include the Near East), chronologically (to include Islamic), and visually (to include personal adornment pieces).

In 2020, the Reverend Daniel Wright, the former pastor of the Weybridge Congregational Church, donated two glass pieces to the museum. They were part of a larger gift that also included Palestinian pottery, a stone vessel, glass fragments, and a figural bronze weight. In addition to the archaeological objects, he also donated non-archeological materials such as booklets, photographs, slides, and notes. The Wright pieces were donated to the college for both research and educational purposes and were allocated between Special Collections at the Davis Library, the Middlebury Museum, its study collection, and the Archeology Lab in Munroe for study and cataloging by students.¹⁰ The two glass pieces Wright donated to the museum collection are unguentaria or tear bottles, common burial pieces characterized by their small, slightly deformed shapes due to the heat of the pyre during cremation.¹¹

The fourth and final component of Middlebury’s collection consists of pieces acquired with the means provided by both the Walter Cerf and the Memorial Arts Funds. These include bottles, jars, and kohl-tubes—vessels designed to hold cosmetics and liquids—as well as two bottles in the shape of dates, which were purchased with funds from the Walter Cerf Art Fund at a Sotheby’s, New York, auction in 2000.¹² The various means of acquisition complement one another in terms of their origin and history and have thus strengthened and diversified Middlebury’s glass holdings as a whole.

Ancient Glass Creation

The making of glass has a long history and its origins are steeped in alluring tales and cultural significance. First encountered in Mesopotamia and Egypt, glass dates back nearly 4,000 years, to the first half of the second millenium BCE.¹³ In its pure elemental form, glass is made of silicon dioxide.¹⁴ Humans have long been enamored with the beauty and functionality of glass and continue to appreciate it in the same manner today. Its origin, however, is shrouded in mystery, though some basic historical and geographical facts are known to further contextualize the ancient pieces we have today, including those at the Middlebury College Museum of Art.

Roman author Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) wrote the Historia Naturalis, a collection of thirty-seven books that detail the wonders and mysteries of the world and cover subjects such as astronomy, medicine, geology, minerals, and glass. In Book 36, Pliny presents an allegorical interpretation of the origin of glass. Set in the sands along the Belus River in Israel, Pliny recounts how ancient Near Eastern nomadic traders of natural soda rested their food cauldrons on lumps of soda and lit a fire underneath it. While heating the cauldrons in preparation of a meal, the soda and sand melded together to create “a strange translucent liquid” that hardened upon cooling. Thus glass was invented, perhaps even accidentally.¹⁵ Pliny’s apocryphal story may not be entirely representative of the true origin of glass, but it does speak to the deep-seated allure of glass that has captivated humans for centuries.

Although archeologists debate the origin of glass to this day, it is generally believed to have first been developed in the Near East or Egypt, as sites of ancient glass production in both of these regions date back to at least 1500 BCE.¹⁶ Glass from the first-millennium BCE, often referred to as “Pre-Roman glass,” consists mainly of beads and bowls and is composed predominantly of core-formed pieces).¹⁷

Core-forming is the earliest-known glass technology and is created by gathering viscous, molten glass around a “core” that is attached to the end of a metal rod. Once the glass has taken shape around the core and has cooled down, the core is scraped out of the vessel.¹⁸ A core was typically made from a mixture of clay and animal dung so it could be molded according to the desired shape of the vessel and be easily removed upon completion.¹⁹

Some examples of early glass pieces include Hellenistic bowls that date to the second and early first centuries BCE and are characterized by their simple, shallow form, and light-green or amber hue. The Hellenistic period, starting with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, lasted until 31 BC, when the last of the Hellenistic region, Ptolemaic Egypt, fell to Rome. By the end of the first century BC, the young Roman Empire had adopted traditionally Hellenistic glassmaking techniques, and continued to practice them for centuries to come.²⁰

In another Hellenistic technique called glass-casting, bowls were created by applying heat to ground glass that had been placed between two molds. The ground glass would then slowly melt and fuse together. Once cooled, it was removed from the mold, and its surfaces ground down and polished.²¹

Roman mosaic glass is another type of ancient glass that is rooted in practices first developed by Hellenistic craftsmen of the eastern Mediterranean region. This technique too was popularized during the late first century BCE. The process to create mosaic glass is as follows: multicolored canes of mosaic glass would be heated and stretched into strips, and then sliced into circular, cookie-shaped cross sections. These small, circular pieces of glass would be arranged in a circular fashion, all touching one another, and then heated up to fuse all the small pieces together. Finally, the fused, circular piece of glass would be slumped over a mold, providing it with shape and structure. Its edges and interiors typically had to be polished, but the surfaces of these vessels remained shiny because of the hot furnace that smoothed roughness, leaving the artist with a glimmering, brightly colored mosaic glass piece.²²

The Roman glass industry took off during the first half of the first century CE and continued to thrive as Rome’s political, military, and economic strengths continued to expand, drawing in glass artisans and creating a vast market for glass objects.²³ Initially invented along the Syro-Palestinian coast,²⁴ glassblowing was refined in Italy between the first and fourth centuries CE.²⁵ A Vicus Vetrarius or “glassworkers quarter” existed near the Porta Capena in Rome. That toponym indicates that glassmaking was a reliable trade that had firmly taken root in the city’s social and economic fabric of the time.²⁶

Glassblowing employs a blowpipe, also known as a punty, that measures three to five feet long, a length necessary to prevent the glass worker from being burned. Hollow vessels result when the punty is dipped in molten glass and blown into.²⁷ Originally made out of clay, blowpipes made of iron were introduced around 70 CE and provided a more robust, reliable means of glass creation.²⁸ A hollow punty allows one to blow through the pipe, inflating the molten glass, creating a vesicle or bulb. To create a rim or opening in the vessel, glass artists would wrap a hot string of molten glass around the edge of a cooled vessel, giving it a thermal shock, and then lightly tap the top to crack off the excess glass.²⁹

Whereas free-blowing is the practice of creating blown glass vessels without the use of a mold, mold-blowing involves blowing the hot glass into a mold, as its name suggests. The result is a variety of shapes that can range from flasks to globular jugs to unguentaria.Invented in Italy around 25 CE, mold-blowing permitted glassblowers to give their products specific and/or uniform shapes, incorporate ornate images in the surface of their objects, or even inscribe their work with words or phrases.³⁰

Solid, mold-blown glass pieces such as medallions, pendants, and plaques were often created with deep-blue colored glass, mimicking precious stones such as lapis lazuli, a gemstone imported from modern-day Afghanistan, beyond the confines of the Roman Empire. Hollow mold-blown pieces were also created, many as flasks that were frequently modeled after fruit, including grapes, pomegranates, and dates.³¹ Mold-blown flasks were blown into molds shaped from real fruit. Date flasks specifically, of which the Middlebury Museum has two, were largely produced from the second quarter of the first century CE to the early second century CE. They held scented oils and medicines that may have contained date extract and were traditionally given as gifts for the new year.³²

Glassblowing, an elaborate but more controlled form of glass creation, allows the glass worker to create almost any shape with freedom and ease, be it free-blown or mold-blown: a bottle, jar, or cup, among other possibilities.³³ Through constant use, a glassblower’s tools typically adjust with time, becoming tailored to the individual artisan. Their tools, therefore, become highly personalized and valued. Additionally, ancient glass workers would often use their tools to pick up pre-heated glass chunks, holding them over a fire pot to slowly melt and shape them instead of dipping the entire punty into a crucible full of previously molten raw glass chunks or ingots. This strategy was particularly advantageous when it came to bead-making since these minute pieces required many small amounts of colored glass: to have an entire crucible full of molten glass for one small bead would be senseless and wasteful.³⁴

The fundamentals of glassblowing have remained essentially the same over time, and typically involve a group of artisans who are directed by one “master-blower.” Although ancient pieces were rarely signed by their creators, every so often a piece is discovered that is inscribed with a glassblower’s name.³⁵ Over thirty glass pieces have been found signed by Ennion, a glassmaker active in the first half of the first century CE.Ennion made large amounts of mold-blown glass, and his pieces can be dated earlier than the majority of other mold-blown pieces, suggesting he played an important role in the technique’s development.³⁶ Furthermore, the fact that Ennion signed his glass wares indicates that he took ownership over his creations, signaling his status as an accomplished and prideful artist. In this way, glass craftsmanship moves beyond a functional practice and into the realm of accomplished creativity, great autonomy, and fine artistry.

Glass In Ancient Rome

Beginning in the first century BCE, the city of Alexandria, Egypt, thrived as a center for glass production, where several workshops have been identified in the archaeological record.³⁷ Ancient glass workshops are essentially factories or communal gathering sites where artisans would assemble to create glasswares that then were sold to local customers or traded by merchants.³⁸ An excavation conducted by archeologists Gladys Davidson Weinberg and Paul Perrot at Jalame, a site in modern-day Israel, details the intricacies and various phases of occupation of a glassblowing workshop during the third and fourth centuries CE. At Jalame, several levels of remains were uncovered. In fact, the glassblowing workshop at Jalame exists on top of a Roman village and cemetery that were both active during the first and second centuries CE.³⁹ The workshop consists of several late-fourth-century furnaces, dumps of broken glass, and glass storage areas. In a personal interview conducted on November 3rd, 2023, at the Corning Museum of Glass, Katherine Larson, the Curator of Ancient Glass at the museum, revealed that due to the corrosive nature of hot glass and the fact that workshops during this time often followed the fuel sources also used for wood-fired stoves, workshop sites typically lasted only between five and ten years before being abandoned or relocated.⁴⁰ Jalame is just one of countless workshops that existed in the Eastern Roman Empire, signaling the prominence and ubiquity of the glass industry during this time, as well as revealing how ancient glass workshops functioned.⁴¹

As glass products became increasingly in-demand commodities for consumers in local markets throughout the Roman Empire, the glass-making profession grew in response, and glass wares became widely available through the glass workshops’ higher operational efficiency and their workers’ greater skill, as well as through economies of scale. Glass was commonly sold to “middle-class” citizens, including merchants, farmers, retired soldiers, and freedmen.⁴² As production increased, innovation in artistry, experimentation, and discovery of new functionalities followed, with glass gradually replacing terracotta wares. Glass vessels functioned as tableware for serving, pouring, and consuming liquids, and were used for preserving medicines and holding scented oils and cosmetics. The Romans favored glass’s neutral, sterile, replicable, and consistent functional properties for producing wine because unlike glazed terracotta, it did not affect flavor. Provided with a sealing stopper, glass also retained alcoholic beverages better than terracotta. As a result, glass jugs, flasks, and decanters became popular in the wine trade by the middle of the first century CE. Furthermore, glassware became more appealing than terracotta because of its impermeability and transparency, rendering it easier to assess the quality and quantity of a vessel’s content.⁴³

Highly skilled artisans also experimented with how to color glass, with a spectrum of results spanning from rich cobalt blue to honey brown, pale yellow, olive-green, and light blue. They would add metals, including copper oxide and pure gold, to the molten glass to color the vessels, with results that would range from opaque to transparent.⁴⁴ Glass craftsmen melted glass from solid ingots, rounded pucks of glass.

They also used and traded raw chunks of glass that could be recycled.⁴⁵ Fragments, chips, and scraps of glass vessels that had broken off during the creation process were commonly recycled and used again after being re-melted into a crucible. Glass that was naturally blue-ish or colorless was favorable, as leftover bits from glass production could be re-melted again and combined with similar glass without polluting or muddying its color.⁴⁶ For example, at Jalame, tail-like fragments of glass were found in massive quantities. They were to be recycled and made into new vessels.⁴⁷

Ancient glass—often shimmery and iridescent in appearance—tends to age well. Because of its fragility, most complete pieces of glass come from funerary context. Both the Hellenistic Greeks and the Romans inhumated their dead, often in elaborate tombs containing grave gifts. Glass vessels excavated from ancient grave sites are typically very well preserved. Carbonic acid and moisture in the air or soil surrounding the vessel, however, can propel the decay of glass. Furthermore, once the surface or “epidermis” of a glass vessel is scratched, carbonic acid and ammonia salts in the air or soil surrounding a vessel will seep into the piece, yielding further decay,⁴⁸ turning the glass into a flaky powder. While there are pieces from Egypt that have been preserved almost perfectly in tombs, Near Eastern and Mediterranean glass has often been subject to wetter conditions, undoubtedly annihilating much of the ancient glass from these regions.⁴⁹

Conclusion

Particular strengths of Middlebury’s collection are in Cypriot wares, the result of the way in which the collection was formed. Most objects, moreover, seem to have come from funerary contexts in the Eastern Mediterranean, as their condition suggests. Having documented each individual piece in the collection’s catalog, their use in teaching could be augmented within the parameters of the international norms and ethical practices that regulate the acquisition of antiquities. This could be achieved through the careful addition of objects to increase the collection’s chronological range and its geographical reach. In addition, pieces pertaining to glass production such as ingots or glass blocks could reference ancient glass production. Finally, adding some objects in colored glass would go a long way to further the collection’s visual appeal.

Chronicling Middlebury’s ancient glass collection has enabled me to experience hands-on work in an engaging and meaningful manner. I have had the unique opportunity to work with its objects firsthand, which has fueled my own investment and drive throughout the project. Furthermore, the opportunity to work closely with and learn from experts in the rarified field of ancient glass has been wonderfully enriching. Each of them has helped me better understand the process of making ancient glass, identify the origin and uses of some of our pieces, and develop a deep appreciation for the craftsmanship that glass vessels manifest.

Although I considered a large amount of scholarship with cross-references between Middlebury’s pieces and their published parallels, nothing is ever entirely certain. In this sense, the world of antiquities presents a never-ending puzzle where questions outnumber answers. Even so, I find it to be a motivating source of scholarship in that new knowledge can continually be unearthed, igniting additional cross-cultural connections to build upon what we already know. In truth, this cataloging project could continue forever, as there is a virtually endless stream of information that could point me in new directions, helping to identify more precisely the origins of specific vessels. In this respect, the study of art history provides the foundation for boundless knowledge, serving as a lens through which history, ideology, and social dynamics may be observed with both compassion and precision.

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Footnotes

1. Katherine Larson, Personal Interview, November 3, 2023. ↩︎
2. “A1.I.5 Commencement Speakers and Honorary Degree Recipients,” Google Sheets, accessed September 27, 2023, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KJvAZLKbiBFfMuQ3d-dj3woT1-cH3_TOJTuzBxh9E3U/edit#gid=0 ↩︎
3. Sally Evans, “Twitchell Display Of Eastern Antiquities Makes Permanent Residence In Library,” The Middlebury Campus, December 3, 1953, https://archive.org/details/middleburyNewspapers_1953-12-03/page/n1/mode/2up?q=%22twitchell+display%22. ↩︎
4. “Karl Twitchell, Mining Engineer.” New York Times, January 10, 1968, 43. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/01/10/88920176.html?pageNumber=43. ↩︎
5. Pieter Broucke, Conversation with Author, November 14, 2023. ↩︎
6. I reached out to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and was put into contact with Jessica Gambling, an archivist at the institution, to see if they had any record of Twitchell’s collection when it was on loan from the Middlebury Museum during the 1950s. Unfortunately, there is no existing record of the Twitchell collection at the LACMA because they were a single museum until 1964 and the records of the Art Department were transferred over when the museum was relocated, leaving some collection pieces with patchy or incomplete records. However, letters from Middlebury Special Collections indicate when the collection was returned to the Middlebury Museum and what pieces it contained. ↩︎
7. Evans, “Twitchell Display,” The collection in its entirety was insured for $5,000 at that time, but this is the only formal indication of the true value of the collection. ↩︎
8. Vassos Karageorghis and J. Paul Getty Museum, Early Cyprus: crossroads of the Mediterranean / Vassos Karageorghis, (Los Angeles, California: Getty, 2002), 11. ↩︎
9. “In Memoriam: Robert P. Youngman ’64,” Middlebury College. Accessed 29 October 2023. https://www.middlebury.edu/announcements/memoriam/2018/01/memoriam-robert-p-youngman-64. ↩︎
10. Pieter Broucke, email message to author, January 16, 2024. ↩︎
11. Peter Cosyns, email message to author, December 18, 2023. ↩︎
12. Meg Wallace, email message to author, November 14, 2023. ↩︎
13. “Origins of Glassmaking,” Corning Museum of Glass, accessed 12 October, 2023, https://whatson.cmog.org/exhibitions-galleries/origins-glassmaking#:~:text=Glass%20has%20always%20been%20found,and%20lime%20to%20make%20glass. ↩︎
14. Carolyn Wilke, “A Brief Scientific History of Glass,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 24 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-brief-scientific-history-of-glass-180979117/. ↩︎
15. “Pliny the Elder,” Corning Museum of Glass, accessed 12 October, 2023, https://www.cmog.org/article/pliny-elder-gaius-plinius-secundus-historia-naturalis-about-ad-77. ↩︎
16. Wilke, “A Brief.” ↩︎
17. Saldern, Glass from Sardis, 5-6. ↩︎
18. “Core Forming,” Corning Museum of Glass, accessed 12 October, 2023, https://allaboutglass.cmog.org/definition/core-forming. ↩︎
19. “Core-Formed Glass,” The New Bedford Museum of Glass, accessed 12 October, 2023, https://www.nbmog.org/core-formed. ↩︎
20. Séan Hemingway, Art of the Hellenistic Age and the Hellenistic Tradition, (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/haht/hd_haht.htm. ↩︎
21. Axel von Saldern, Ancient and Byzantine Glass from Sardis (London: Harvard University Press, 1980), 5-7. ↩︎
22. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Mosaic and Network Glass.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rmos/hd_rmos.htm (October 2003). ↩︎
23. Rosemarie Trentinella, Roman Glass, (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rgls/hd_rgls.htm. ↩︎
24. Marianne E. Stern, “Roman Glassblowing in a Cultural Context,” American Journal of Archaeology 103, no. 3 (1999): 441–84. ↩︎
25. Saldern, Glass from Sardis, 9-33. ↩︎
26. Stern, “Roman Glassblowing,” 441-84. ↩︎
27. “What is a Punty?,” Corning Museum of Glass, Accessed 12, October, 2023 https://blog.cmog.org/2014/12/22/what-is-a-punty/. ↩︎
28. Amastassios Antonaras, Fire and Sand (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 23. ↩︎
29. Ben Miller, interview with Katherine Larson, Curious Objects: New Perspectives on Ancient Glass, with Katherine Larson, podcast audio, August 15, 2023, https://www.themagazineantiques.com/article/curious-objects-new-perspectives-on-ancient-glass-with-katherine-larson/. ↩︎
30. Marianne E. Stern, “Three Notes on Early Roman Mold-Blown Glass,” Journal of Glass Studies 42, (2000): 165–67. ↩︎
31. Dillon, Glass, 57. ↩︎
32. Elizabeth Milleker Johnston and Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Year One: Art of the Ancient World East and West (New York and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/The_Year_One_Art_of_the_Ancient_World_East_and_West. ↩︎
33. Edward Dillon, Glass (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, London: Methuen and Co., 1907), 8. ↩︎
34. Stern, “Roman Glassblowing,” 452. ↩︎
35. Stern, “Roman Glassblowing,” 456. ↩︎
36. Lightfoot, Ennion, 19-21. ↩︎
37. Ben Miller, interview with Katherine Larson, Curious Objects: New Perspectives on Ancient Glass, with Katherine Larson, podcast audio, August 15, 2023, https://www.themagazineantiques.com/article/curious-objects-new-perspectives-on-ancient-glass-with-katherine-larson/. ↩︎
38. Katherine Larson and John Swogger, Dig Deeper: Discovering the Ancient Glass Workshop at Jalame (Corning, NY: The Corning Museum of Glass, 2023), 12. ↩︎
39. Larson and Swogger, Dig Deeper, 27. ↩︎
40. Katherine Larson, Personal Interview, November 3, 2023. ↩︎
41. Larson and Swogger, Dig Deeper, 27. ↩︎
42. Ben Miller, interview with Katherine Larson, Curious Objects: New Perspectives on Ancient Glass, with Katherine Larson, podcast audio, August 15, 2023, https://www.themagazineantiques.com/article/curious-objects-new-perspectives-on-ancient-glass-with-katherine-larson/. ↩︎
43. Stern, “Roman Glassblowing,” 442. ↩︎
44. Dillon, Glass, 53. ↩︎
45. Katherine Larson, Personal Interview, November 3, 2023. ↩︎
46. Stern, “Roman Glassblowing,” 465. ↩︎
47. Katherine Larson, Personal Interview, November 3, 2023. ↩︎
48. Dillon, Glass, 16. ↩︎
49. Wilke, “A Brief.” ↩︎

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