Bernard Gratuze

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• PhD HDR
• Research Director at CNRS Orleans Campus

The systematic chemical analysis of large collections of archaeological glass beads is essential to better understand trade patterns at different times around the world. Glass beads’ trade towards and within sub-Saharan West Africa grew exponentially over time to culminate with the establishment of the Atlantic Trade. Although these artefacts are v...

The Caribbean islands witnessed a population expansion of ceramic-using horticulturalists during the Early Ceramic Age (ca. 500 BC to 750 AD) from the Orinoco Valley to Puerto Rico. We examined 18 lithic artefacts from Guadeloupe and Dominica initially thought to be obsidian, a material believed to be absent from those islands. We investigated the...

Bifacial tools discovered at about a hundred Lower Palaeolithic sites in the Bose Basin, southern China, have been previously dated to around 800,000 years ago. This age was obtained by dating four tektites directly associated with the tools at the Nalai site using the 40Ar/39Ar method (Michel et al., 2021). Similar ages on tektites from the Bogu a...

MOTS CLÉS : Fiole, verre islamique, péninsule Ibérique, LA-ICP-MS, archéométrie, échange international RÉSUMÉ : À Limoges, une fosse, dont le comblement est daté des XI e-XII e siècles, a révélé l' existence d' une fiole en verre épais verdâtre. Si sa facture n' est pas exceptionnelle, la forme est par contre complètement originale en France, surto...

One of the most recognized decorations of the pick-up technique is the millefiori glass, which has been commonly attributed to Venetian production. However, Portugal is the country where the largest known assemblage of this type of glass artefact has been studied and published. In this work, two important archeological contexts were selected: (1) S...

Screen protectors for smartphone are investigated in attempts for emergency dosimetry as for example in case of malicious attacks with radioactive sources or accidental overexposure. Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) measurements were carried out on six different types of screen protectors (SPs). The inter and intra batch variability of the EPR...

Forensic analysis of fine art and objet d’art uses accurately determined pigment compositions to confirm or deny provenance, dating and attribution. Some of the most important pigments in this respect are those associated with cobalt. The Blaafarveværket, or Blue Colour Works, based near Modum in Norway, was a producer of cobalt products (especiall...

Hodoni "Pocioroane" is one of the archaeological sites discovered near the village of Hodoni/Hodony, ca. 25 km north of Timişoara, in the Romanian Banat. The excavations carried out at "Pocioroane" have yielded traces of superimposed Neolithic settlements and a medieval cemetery. This paper considers 113 obsidian artefacts recovered during the exca...

Archaeological studies carried out in recent decades have demonstrated that the Pre-Pyrenees, a mountain range in northeast Iberia, were regularly frequented by several human groups during the Late Pleistocene. The Cova del Parco archaeological site is an example of this large-scale and regular human presence. The site was discovered and first exca...

The NASA Mars 2020 Perseverance rover is actively exploring Jezero crater to conduct analyses on igneous and sedimentary rock targets from outcrops located on the crater floor (Máaz and Séítah formations) and from the delta deposits, respectively. The rock samples collected during this mission will be recovered during the Mars Sample Return mission...

L’histoire de la côte ivoirienne, dans son rapport avec l’occident, a d’abord été l’œuvre des historiens et des géographes. Les archéologues ont peu à peu pris la place qui leur revient, en s’intéressant d’abord aux outils lithiques, aux amas coquilliers, à la céramique. Toutes les périodes, du paléolithique à l’actuel ont été prises en compte avec...

We report the archaeological findings from the historic site of Kuchchaveli in the northeastern coast of Sri Lanka, based on our excavations in 2011. The Kuchchaveli complex revealed features of a Mahāyāna Buddhist centre during the 7th and 8th centuries as indicated by the structures and an inscription as well as a number of Buddhist sculptures an...

The Caribbean islands witnessed a population expansion of horti-ceramicists during the Early Ceramic Age (ca. 500 BC to 750 AD) from the Orinoco Valley to Puerto Rico. We examined 18 lithic artefacts from Guadeloupe and Dominica, initially thought to be obsidian, a material believed to be absent from those islands. We investigated the volcanic or m...

A questão da produção local de vidro romano em Conímbriga foi pela primeira vez levantada por Jorge de Alarcão em 1964. Em 2009, ao tratarmos da produção de vidro no noroeste peninsular, dedicamos‑lhe uma pequena nota de revisão onde se defendia que a produção de vidro em Conímbriga, sendo plausível, não havia sido comprovada de forma irrefutável....

In the last 25 years a conspicuous amount of plane glass – windowpane fragments – has surfaced on archaeological sites from the Viking Age. These finds have not received scholarly attention as they are not recognised as a genuine prehistoric (i.e. pre-1050 Scandinavia) occurrence. This paper aims to investigate a select group of archaeological loca...

In recent decades, the development of different analytical procedures applied to the study of archaeological lithic remains has allowed us to approach the territoriality of past societies. The application of geochemical tools has improved the study of lithic raw materials, allowing direct connections between archaeological samples and specific geol...

Dès la Préhistoire, les matières premières sont indispensables aux besoins utilitaires, fonctionnels, esthétiques, voire ostentatoires des groupes humains. Leur utilisation témoigne d’inventivités technologiques, d’adaptabilités et de connaissances de la propriété technique de chaque matériau. À la pré- et protohistoire, trois circuits d’acquisitio...

The use of geochemistry to characterize chert tools recovered at hunter-gatherer sites is particularly interesting for inferring the territorial behavior of past societies and their mobility routes. In western Europe, the Pyrenean mountain range is one of these areas where analysing past human mobility is especially challenging. This mountain chain...

Being Lisbon one of the world’s most important trading port and a place where historical documents attest the presence of at least four glass furnaces working between the 16th and 17th centuries, the authors decided to investigate one of the most luxurious coeval glass decorative techniques (millefiori) found in Lisbon to try to understand the trad...

We examine here the glass finds from the Vetricella site. This site, investigated during the ERC-Avanced nEU-Med project (www.neu-med.unisi.it ) is interpreted as the centre of the royal curtis of Valli attested in documentary sources from 937. During the excavation, a large number of glass objects dated from the 4th to the 12th centuries were unea...

Pour les périodes anciennes, l’affinage de l’argent se pratique classiquement par coupellation. Il existe cependant d’autres procédés permettant d’obtenir un argent pur. En se basant sur une recette du début du XVIe siècle, nous montrons grâce à l’expérimentation archéologique la pertinence d’un traitement d’un alliage argentifère par ajout de verr...

The analysis of 107 obsidian samples collected in the course of the archaeological investigations carried out from 2009 to 2019 by the Georgian-Italian expeditions in Eastern Georgia in the provinces of Shida Kartli (Natsargora, Aradetis Orgora and Okherakhevi) and Kakheti (Tsiteli Gorebi 5) allowed us to confirm the existence of two contrasting ob...

This paper discusses the process, prospects, and challenges of making bikini glass in Bida (Nupeland), central Nigeria. The Masagá glassmakers of Bida provide the ideal case study for investigating the production of bikini. Nineteenth-century Arab and European writings have described glassmaking in Nupeland; however, with the exception of the study...

Our recent LA-ICP-MS analyses of glass ingots from the Uluburun shipwreck along with additional samples from Egyptian sites, primarily Amarna, encourage us to question how and where the ingots were produced. Because almost all the approximately 200 glass ingots are either greenish blue, colored by copper, or purplish blue, colored by cobalt, we foc...

The Great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus built between about 706 and 714/15 CE is the oldest surviving mosque that still preserves large parts of its original architecture and decoration. The origins of the mosaic tesserae have been the subject of debate for more than a thousand years. The earliest sources written two centuries after the construction o...

Xicotó Rockshelter (Alòs de Balaguer, Lleida, Spain) is located in the eastern Pre-Pyrenean range in north-east Iberia, in the middle Segre River Basin. Since 2013, archaeological works have been developed by a team from the Prehistoric Studies and Research Seminar (SERP) at the University of Barcelona and up to three sedimentary levels have been i...

The composition of archaeological glass reflects the geochemical nature of its raw materials. To determine the origins and distribution of early Islamic glasses from Iran, a set of 169 glass samples from five different sites was analysed by laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) of 58 elements. The glasses were clas...

The reconstruction of the trade routes along which garnets reached Europe in the early Middle Ages demonstrates the persistence of long-distance trade after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Early medieval garnet jewellery from Italy and the presence of lapidary workshops are important evidence for understanding the dynamics of this commerce bu...

Bien que le développement du cristal au plomb constitue une étape majeure dans l’histoire du verre à la fin du XVIIe siècle, la présence de plomb dans des matrices vitreuses (verres et glaçures) est beaucoup plus ancienne, son usage date du second millénaire avant notre ère.Le plomb dans les matériaux vitreux du patrimoine retrace l’histoire de ces...

In this article a method with which chemical groups of beads from a single Merovingian cemetery can be distinguished is explained and tested. In short, this is accomplished by chemically analysing the complete glass bead assemblage of the 6th-century cemetery Lent-Lentseveld with both pXRF and LA-ICP-MS, and using Principal Component Analyses (PCA)...

The glass ingots from the Late Bronze Age Uluburun shipwreck (ca. 1300 BCE) provide crucial insight into Late Bronze Age glass production and exchange in the Mediterranean. Almost all of the approximately 200 glass ingots on board the ship were sampled as well as five of the 30 Mycenaean glass relief beads. Here we report the full chemical composit...

Between 2000 and 2005 alongside their Iranian colleagues, the team from the German Mining Museum examined the prehistoric copper-mining area located close to the village of Veshnaveh in the mountains of central Iran. Two mines, Chale Ghar 1 and 2, which had been hollowed out by copper-mining activities, had been filled with the water from melting s...

Portuguese archaeological excavations dated to the 17th century onwards are extremely rich in glass artefacts, with this being a reality from the north to the south of the territory. Contrasting with this reality, no glass production locations from this period have been discovered or excavated so far, which makes the provenance attribution a challe...

The article dates back to 2017 and gives the results of analyses on different kinds of materials (metals including gold, stones and obsidian) found at Mentesh Tepe (Azerbaijan) and dated between the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age with the aim to find their sources.

Cet ouvrage marque l’aboutissement de plusieurs années de recherche du Projet Collectif de Recherches AnTaReC (https://antarec.hypotheses.org/). Créé en 2015, il vise au développement de la recherche sur la fin de la période romaine pour l’ensemble de la région Centre-Val de Loire. C’est dans le cadre de la valorisation de ses travaux qu’il a accue...

This contribution presents the first comprehensive survey of the protohistoric glasses found on the Altopiano dei Sette Comuni Vicentini in the sites of Monte Corgnon (Lusiana) and Bostel (Rotzo) during the excavations directed by Armando De Guio. Starting from the history of the studies, the work offers insights into the typo-chronology, stratigra...

Excavations in the Roman villa of Aiano yielded twenty glass beads, a pendant, and a glass-recycling furnace, originally interpreted as a bead workshop. This article reassesses the evidence of bead making in light of new data obtained thanks to recent progress in archaeological glass studies. A detailed study of the typology, technology, and chemic...

This paper aims to apprehend evolution of ceramic manufacture strategy in the Johnston‐Vieillard manufactory (Bordeaux, France), which produced white earthenwares between 1835 and 1895. Glazes of fragments of 76 sherds, dated from different periods of the 19th century and found in excavations were characterised thanks to combined chemical and mecha...

Istria and the Kvarner archipelago are strategically located on the main maritime trade routes connecting the eastern Mediterranean with the western provinces of the Byzantine Empire in the late antique period, and with Carolingian Europe in the ninth century. Ecclesiastical and monastic institutions played a significant role in the establishment a...

The factors and dynamics that initiated the Neolithisation process in the South Caucasus between the very end of the 7th and the beginning of the 6th millennium BCE are still unclear and hotly debated. It is within this framework that the excavations at Kiçik Tepe, in the middle Kura river valley of Western Azerbaijan, aim to offer new data and new...

The production of natron glass started at the beginning of the first millennium BCE and prevailed in the Mediterranean world for almost two thousand years. This production seems to cease progressively from the end of the eighth century CE onwards, with a different timing based on the region (e.g. Syria, Egypt). A recent study of Islamic glass weigh...

In recent years, chemical analyses of glass beads excavated from late Antique and Early Middle Age sites in western and north-western Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany and Sweden) have revealed for the first time the presence of two groups of glass beads with unexpected compositions for these periods and geographic areas. The f...

The multi-method study of a Pyrenean lithological tracer, the Montgaillard-Montsaunès chert type, is presented in this paper. These cherts outcrop in the northern Pyrenees, in three outcrops belonging to two Upper Cretaceous formations: the marly flysch cherts from the Campanian-Maastrichtian (Buala and Montsaunès outcrops) and the grey flysch cher...

Recent archaeological research has highlighted the potential role of mobile pastoral groups in the diffusion of raw materials and technological innovations between the southern Caucasus and north‐western Iran from the Neolithic onwards. Two successive projects, PAST‐OBS and SCOPE, were designed to explore this hypothesis through the study of obsidi...

The recently discovered Nalai site is one of the Bose Basin localities, which is key to studying the earliest bifaces in China. The Nalai site has yielded an abundance of lithic artifacts, including bifaces and tektites in close association. The total fusion 40Ar/39Ar method was applied to four tektites discovered beside and contemporaneous with bi...

Fuente del Trucho cave (Asque‐Colungo, Huesca, Spain) is located in the central Pre‐Pyrenean range in north‐east Iberia, in the Arpán ravine, a tributary of the Vero River. The mouth of the cave is 22 m wide and it is oriented to the south‐east. The entrance gives access to a 24 m‐deep hall. Palaeolithic paintings were discovered in the cave in 197...

In this work we have analysed the provenance of the lithic raw materials recovered during the excavation campaigns at two Mesolithic sites of the Cantabrian Mountains: La Uña (levels III and IV) and El Espertín (level II). From the data obtained, differences between the two deposits and their levels have been observed, with sourcing of very similar...

Métaux, pierres et autres matériaux de construction, roches nobles, bois, textiles, cuirs, sel, matières tinctoriales, etc., les matières premières, brutes ou issues d’une première phase de transformation, n’ont pas été peu nombreuses, dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Âge, à circuler sur des petites et moyennes distances, quand elles n’ont pas entrepri...

This article gives the results of the analyses made by several specialists on some of the raw materials (metal, obsidian and semi-precious stones) found at Mentesh Tepe (Middle Kura Valley, Azerbaijan) during the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age periods. They show that the procurement zone extends between 30 to 300 km away from the site. The...

Located on the plateau of Larzac, the site of Soulages testifies, for the first time in a low mountain area, a rural settlement which expand from the 6th to the 9th century. The remains are organised in an area that groups together all living quarters, mixed with the burials of the inhabitants. Within this area, the buildings are divided by activit...

Most of the artifacts were found in secondary position in the excavation backdirt. The number and weight of all the pieces were recorded in a database coupled with a GIS permitting each researcher to orient their analysis. The residence yielded 476 kg of amphoras sherds, representing at least 422 recipients [fig. 174]. The distribution and nature o...

Situé sur le causse du Larzac, le site de Soulages illustre, pour la première fois dans ce secteur de moyenne montagne, une occupation rurale qui se développe du vie siècle au ixe siècle. Les vestiges sont organisés dans un espace qui regroupe l’ensemble des lieux de vie, mêlés aux sépultures des habitants. Au sein de cet espace, les bâtiments sont...

El yacimiento de Soulages, situado en la meseta calcárea del Larzac, ilustra, por primera vez en este sector de media montaña, una ocupación rural que se desarrolla entre los siglos VI y IX. Los restos se organizan en un espacio que agrupa el conjunto de los lugares de vida, mezclados con las sepulturas de los habitantes. En el seno de este espacio...

Zusammenfassung: Die auf der Hochebene Causse du Larzac gelegene Siedlung von Soulages liefert ein bislang unbekanntes Beispiel für eine ländliche Ansiedlung in mittlerer Höhenlage, die sich zwischen dem 6. und 9. Jahrhundert n. Chr. entwickelte. Die Hinterlassenschaften umfassen den gesamten Siedlungsbereich, sowie Gräber der Bewohner. Innerhalb d...

The presence of glass beads in West African archaeological sites provides important evidence of long-distance trade between this part of the continent and the rest of the world. Until recently, most of these items came from historical Sub-Saharan urban centers, well known for their role in the medieval trans-Saharan trade. We present here the chemi...

Handheld (portable) X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (pXRF) allows for fast, in situ surface analysis, however, its application in archaeological research requires substantial optimisation. This paper investigates the matrix effects of high lead glass on the experimental results of pXRF in comparison to laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass...

The cave of Getahovit-2 is situated in north-eastern Armenia, in the foothills of the Lesser Caucasus which dominate the valley of the Kura. The excavations (2011–2017), carried out by the Armenian-French mission ‘Caucasus’, have revealed several phases of occupation – Upper Palaeolithic (ca 22,000 cal BC), Chalcolithic (ca. 4700-4050 cal BC), and...

The materials, painting techniques and conservation state of the enamelled stain glass of the Catalan Modernist workshops operating in Barcelona are studied. It is known for its creativity and artistic value where textured, flashed, coloured and enamelled glasses concur. In the late 19th century, Catalan workshops used a new type of ready-to-be-use...