Glass finds from a Late Antique-Byzantine farm at Aïn Ouassel (Tunisia)

Despite the reduced quantities of glass finds in comparison to other groups of archaeological materials, studies on Ancient glass have extraordinary developed in the last decades. Thanks to the increasing contribution of chemical analyses of samples from several sites, the distribution and chronology of Roman and Byzantine glass forms can today be related to information about specific production centres. The following research concerns the glass assemblage of a Late Antique farm at Aïn Ouassel, in the surroundings of Thugga in Tunisia. The recorded multipurpose glass forms, especially plates, beakers and goblets, reflect their conventional use in Roman and Byzantine time also in the countryside, far from the Mediterranean coast. Right now, the advancing chemical analyses on some samples reveal similarities with the known data about central and northern Tunisian glass collections. As for the rest of Tunisia, local production centres haven’t been detected even in the surveyed area around the excavated farm.