Glass ornaments in the Late Islamic period: composition of glass bangles from northern Qatar.

Glass ornaments such as bangles are widely distributed along trade routes between the East and West, indicating interactions and exchange between manufacturing and consumption sites. In the Persian Gulf region, numerous glass bangles have been excavated from late 2nd millennium CE contexts, but few of these have been studied with scientific analysis. Here, we report data on 56 representative samples from assemblages found at seven coastal sites of northern Qatar that date between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries CE, analysed by laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). We identify six different glass compositions and discuss their raw materials and likely provenances, including one group from the Levant, one group from Mesopotamia and another two groups using different plant types as fluxes, with their sand source similar to Sasanian glasses from Central Iraq between the third and seventh centuries CE, and two high-alumina outliers associated with two Indian origins. The paper also compares the Qatar bangles with others from the Islamic world and India to discuss differences and similarities between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]