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# Afterword David Whitehouse The glass from the Serçe Limanı shipwreck is of unique importance because (1) the sample is very large; (2) it comes from an undisturbed context that is closely datable by some of the associated artifacts; (3) it was excavated and recorded meticulously ; (4) the tasks of sorting, mending, and classifying the material were completed in an exemplary manner; and (5) samples of the glass were subjected to chemical analysis to determine their composition. Any one of these factors would have made the glass important; the combination of all five makes it invaluable. They enabled the excavators to demonstrate , for example, that the ship was carrying about three tons of cullet (glass intended to be remelted and formed into objects ) in the form of raw glass and fragments of vessels packed in baskets; that one or more of the ship’s last ports of call were in the Levant; and that the ship sank in or shortly after 1025. Just as the Uluburun and Yassi Ada (or Yassıada) shipwrecks opened “windows” into exchange systems in the fourteenth century b.c. and the seventh century a.d., so the Serçe Limanı wreck opens an unprecedented window into the glass industry in the same region in the early eleventh century. In addition to the typological categories described elsewhere in this volume, the glass from Serçe Limanı may be divided into five groups: 1. Complete vessels that are believed to have been brought on board for use during the voyage. 2. Complete vessels believed to have been brought on board as cargo. 3. Raw glass. 4. A large and rather uniform collection of fragments of vessels and by-products of glass working believed to have been acquired from one or more glass workshops. It is important to recognize that these vessels were already broken when they were packed in baskets and taken on board. 5. A small, heterogeneous collection of fragments, also believed to have been broken before the voyage, which had evidently been collected for recycling and included in the cargo of cullet. These distinctions are significant because they lead us to several important conclusions. We conclude that the objects in group 1 were the personal property of people on the ship when she sank, and that group 2 consists of vessels intended for the marketplace. The fragments in groups 3 and 4 were cullet being shipped between glass factories and workshops. The fragments in group 5 were also cullet. With the possible exception of fragments in group 5, it is reasonable to assume that all of the glass was new or nearly new when the ship foundered. In other words, almost all this material (with the possible exception of fragments in group 5 that may have been old when they were broken or discarded) was made in the early eleventh century. Moreover, the chemical analyses indicate that the cullet is similar to glass from Caesarea, Tyre, and other sites in the Levant. This leads to the conclusion that most if not all the glass from Serçe Limanı was made in the Levant, or at least was made from raw glass produced in the Levant. 506 part xiv: conclusions working, and I assume that the factory was not in the business of making vessels. The largest furnace had a rectangular tank originally 6.40 m long and 3.90 m wide, but relining it on two occasions reduced the length to 5.90 m. The last time it was used, the tank was filled with glass to a depth of at least 0.80 m. The last firing, therefore, produced more than 18 cubic meters of raw glass, with an estimated weight of more than 50 metric tons; if the entire melt were usable, this would have been sufficient to make more than five hundred thousand 100 g objects. Unfortunately, the factory is poorly dated. The glassmakers used plant ash as the source of their soda, and so the factory should not be earlier than the eighth century; and it should not be later than 1291, when Tyre was razed to the ground by an army of the Mamluk sultan Qalawun. Fragments of glazed pottery found in debris associated with the abandonment or demolition of the largest furnace are attributed to the tenth to eleventh century. The factory, therefore, may have functioned within a generation or two of the Serçe Limanı shipwreck, but this is uncertain. Tyre was certainly not the only place in...

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