Jing Yeung (UCL) - 2024-25 Students
valerie.yeung.16@ucl.ac.uk

Tracing the Glass Road: Complex network analysis of plant ash glass trade in Early Islamic Central Asia

Glass, as both material and object, has a demonstrated capacity for revealing socioeconomic structures wherever it is found. Its relative archaeological ubiquity across the Silk Roads has made it an ideal material to monitor the social exchange of knowledge and goods across its expanse.

Glassmaking recipes have distinct regional varieties that are defined by craft traditions, raw materials, and production scale. They can be proxied by the heterogenous glass chemistry. The production and trade of Islamic glass flourished under the economy of the Abbasid caliphate in the late 1st millennium CE, finding its way to high status Chinese contexts. Under the Islamic ‘world system’, academic interest has concentrated on the Eastern Mediterranean, the heartland of Islamic influence and a region with a long history of glassmaking. Glass production in Central Asia is less well-understood despite its geographical significance on the Silk Roads. Indeed, the region offers a nexus of connectivity where people, ideas, and material culture intersect and develop in unique ways.

Connectivity is a central theme of the UNESCO’s Silk Roads Programme, which celebrates the diversity and exchange of people, knowledge, cultures and beliefs along the trade routes. The complex nature of the Silk Roads and glassmaking technology provide an ideal opportunity for applying insights from complex network theory, which is an innovative approach in archaeology for modelling the dynamic structure of agent relationships across time and space. Its novel application to glass chemistry will help better understand the production and exchange of this material, providing deeper insight into human interaction in the region.

Tracing the Glass Road (TGR) aims to examine the regional circulation patterns of glass trade between the 9th-13th centuries CE. Chemical analysis of well-dated glass assemblages from Central Asia will provide insight into the organisation of regional glass production and craft traditions. The distribution patterns of glass groups and their changes will be examined geographically and diachronically using geographical information systems techniques. Incorporating legacy data of Islamic glass from other regions, complex network theory will, for the first time, be applied to evaluate and visualise the intra- and inter-regional connectivity of glass trade. Literature review of trades of other commodities will be conducted to assess the use of glass in studying exchanges along the Silk Roads.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative has reignited political and public interest in the Silk Roads. TGR will yield a crucial chemical dataset of glass for Silk Roads archaeologists, refine sampling strategies, and produce network models that generate new insights for glass circulation from fragmented records in Central Asia. The latter will be applicable to other materials and study regions, providing guidance for future integrations of landscape and chemistry into archaeological narratives. The new window TGR opens to the movements and interaction of people, ideas and goods in Central Asia, will create a meaningful contribution to UNESCO’s Silk Roads Programme’s initiatives for highlighting the timeless significance of the Silk Roads’ network and heritage. TGR also aspires to create societal impacts through contributing to local heritage projects.

Principal Supervisor: Dr Michael Charlton