Reperti di vetro e pasta vitrea

The glass material coming from the excavation in the area of the church of Sant'Andrea amounts to 187 fragments in total (163 from Sector C, 24 from Sector C1). These are prevalently pieces of body sherds, small in size, rarely recomposable: a common characteristic of the context of this settlement, due to the fact that the material is found in collapse layers, filling layers, floor levels and use layers and which were continuously trampled on. The archaeometric study focuses on a selection of glass fragments found in Sector C and dating back to the Middle Age-Renaissance period. In the context of technological evolution of glass, this is a crucial period since, starting from the 9th century AD, there is a radical change in the raw materials used for its production both in the East and in the West: natron, the flux typical of the Roman and Early Medieval period, is replaced by ashes of both continental (mainly used in northern Europe) and coastal (in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean area) plants, with consequent influence on the final chemical composition of the glass. Aiming at better characterising the production technologies used, the chemical data of the Loppio glasses were compared with those of glasses from the same period and different areas. In particular, considering the importance of the Venetian and Tuscan glass-working areas during the Middle Age and the Renaissance, we compared our data with those from Venetian and Tuscan glass samples, analysed so far, dating from the 11th to the 18th century.