Search

The Caribbean Sea was a conduit for human mobility and the exchange of goods and ideas during the whole of its pre-colonial history. The period cal. AD 1000-1800, covering the Late Ceramic Age and early colonial era, represents an archaeologically understudied time during which the Lesser Antilles came under increasing influence from the Greater Antilles and coastal South America and participated in the last phase of indigenous resistance to colonial powers. This article summarizes the results of the Island Network project, supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in which a multi-disciplinary set of archaeological, archaeometric, geochemical, GIS, and network science methods and techniques have been employed to disentangle this turbulent era in regional and global history. These diverse approaches reveal and then explore multi-layered networks of objects and people and uncover how Lesser Antillean communities were created and transformed through teaching, trade, migration, movement, and exchange of goods and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Handheld x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (HH-XRF) was successfully used to distinguish panes of 17th century, high lime, low alkali (HLLA) glass from later restoration pieces within an in situ window in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. In addition the non-destructive analysis was able to differentiate between the work of two 17th century artists within the same window. The varying compositions of glass present in the window represent the turbulent history of the cathedral glass, and the changing attitudes towards painted glass windows. Following the success of this work, a second study was undertaken to attempt to calibrate the HH-XRF for the analysis of Roman glass from museum and private collections. The results of the second study were disappointing; while the HH-XRF results of the standards compared well with the chemistry, the results of Roman glasses did not. This paper compares the two studies and addresses some of the reasons why the analyses of 17th century HLLA glass was so successful, yet the analyses of Roman glass was unsuccessful. There is much potential for the use of HH-XRF within the correct research framework, but more work needs to be completed before this non-destructive technique can reliably replace destructive analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]