 I would like to thank the organisers for inviting me. They've given me a considerable challenge. When I thought I had to talk about puren and glass in 15 minutes, I almost hemorrhaged the thought. I'm not deliberately going to talk much about the analysis of glass because the rest of you are, but I will talk about puren and the implications of these new analyses if you see what I mean. So let's begin so that there's some discussion at the end. I'll just let these people come in. The Belgian historian Henri Peren, who lived from 1862 to 1935, as I suspect many of you know, used archaeology sparingly in his work and made almost no reference, of course, to glass. Glass paradoxically captivates modern archaeologists precisely because it appears to represent a commodity rather than a precious prestige object such as gems, for example. Being coloured, glass possesses a quality that most commodities found in archaeological levels do not have. No surprise, then, given the technical procedures involved in glassmaking, that there is a substantial literature on this commodity, especially its scientific composition, surpassed only by study of ceramics. Perhaps it is less surprising that no one has attempted to understand the role of this commodity in the context of the making of the Middle Ages in Peren's celebrated thesis set out in his posthumous book, Mohammed el-Charlemagne of 1937. Peren's thesis has an enduring fascination as Bonnie F. Ross, the historian Bonnie F. Ross has recently pointed out in a wonderful article, and I choose hers because it is one of the few that actually uses archaeology, emphasising how archaeology has helped us to renew our understanding of this great book. The answer to it, let me remind you, is a theme that the later historian Ferdinand Brodell recalls. On encountering Peren in 1928, then lecturing in Algiers, Brodell tells us, Peren, speaking without notes, gestured continuously, you can see him here, opening and closing his hand as he sparked a vision of a unified Mediterranean, then its ebb and flow, its expansion and closure, its insularity and boundlessness, its complex diversity, and yet its unity. So you should keep this image in your mind as I try and copy a little bit of what Peren was like. One further image, and I concur with Bonnie F. Ross, that like many other works of this era, Mohammed el-Charlemagne is sewn with 19th and early 20th century colonial language. This is especially evident in his obviously anachronistic treatment of the Arab conquest of North Africa. Bonnie F. Ross asserts that Mohammed el-Charlemagne, and I quote, is derived, and I have the quotes, foremost from Peren's desire to understand the origins of late medieval cities, the main focus of his earlier research. To this end, Peren argued that there was a clean break between the cities of Roman antiquity, the lifeblood of which were the Syrian merchants who served as the mediators of long distance Mediterranean trade in luxury objects and urban centres that emerged during the central middle ages. In Peren's estimation, classical cities died out during the course of the Merovingian period and bequeath nothing but their names and walls to the new towns and churches that emerged in the late 10th and 11th centuries. She continues, Peren's work effectively captured the transition from the empire to the post-Roman states by pointing not just to change conditions of political and economic activity, but also, and this is a central point in why I used colour at the beginning, also to alter psychological and religious attitudes. She concludes, while no interpretation will be able to solve all the ignigmas of this period, it is time to relinquish a model too broad in its strokes and problematic in its implications. She is correct. History with the aid of archaeology has moved on. Archaeological excavations over the last 50 years show that Peren was correct to identify the clean break in urban life in Western Europe. But Peren, drawing largely on textual sources, failed to grasp the nuances of regional into regional chronologies. To be fair, these chronologies have been revolutionised with new dating techniques. As significantly, Peren could not measure ebb and flow. Measurements are central to archaeology as to chronology. From the size of historical buildings to the chemical contents of glass, measurement makes history. Put together for the 6th to 9th century history of glass and the result essentially affirms, those are the quotes I should have shown you earlier, the result essentially affirms part of Peren's explanation for the scaffolding of the Middle Ages. I put the two famous quotes without Muhammad, Charlemagne would have been inconceivable. And the other one, which I will come back to, the Carolingian empire, rather the empire of Charlemagne was the scaffolding of the Middle Ages. The state upon which it was founded was extremely weak and would presently crumble. But the empire would survive as the higher unity of Western Christendom. And it's that unity which I will come back to in a moment. Here, Rome, city where I live, which is where you can see most clearly today this break with antiquity through lots and lots of excavations over the last 20 years. So a short history of glass consumption and then some discussion. Glass was an intrinsic part of elite culture in the early empire. You see it in all the main urban centres, you see it in the villas, you see it in the cemeteries. It is rare on peasant sites. Those peasant sites that have been excavated produce almost no glass. And that's a big difference that we tend to forget since they make up only a mere 80% to 90% of the sites from the Roman world. By late Roman times, the early imperial Italian factories are closed. But those in the Levant outlived antiquity to become important producers in the subsequent Umayyad and Abbasid periods. In later Roman Italy, glass regained its status with small glass workshops using recycled glass meeting consumer needs. These were based in ports like Rome. And so there's been the major excavations under Metro Chi at the Piazza Madonna di Loretto at the foot of the Campadolio where the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957. It's very symbolic and at the Crypta Balbi. Other such sites are the cabotage sites like Albaresi on the coast of Tuscany in the old Mancio in land in Tuscany at Bonconventa. The revival of glass production in late antiquity in the central Mediterranean was meant to be connected to the revival for liturgical demand rather than tableware. The principal demand was for funerary vessels and lamps as well as window glass for churches. Workshops were using recycled glass to provide sufficient for one place a church or perhaps an itinerant salesman and I think the latter is hypothesis. Contrasting east and central Mediterranean outputs could not be greater. And leventine factories continued as Umeag palace towns like Raka and Tire producing products found we now know in western China in the Taran Basin from 7th, 8th century graves and from Japan in the 7th century. The factories manufactured tons of primary material, raw glass. Ffurnaces one and two at Tire for example produced according to David Whitehouse and estimated 140 tons of glass in each load. Moving to the Merafyngiad North Sea world, glass separates two ethnic cultures. Imported Roman and some Frankish glass was commonly used in western Britain and Ireland almost certainly for a long time coming out of the western Iberian port of Vigo which in itself was using a lot of recycled glass I understand from the eastern Mediterranean. In and you can see you in Campbell's imported glass groups over 300 vessels have been found on 45 settlement sites. For instance a Spanish glass flag and an Anglo-Saxon claw beaker have been found in recent excavations of a mid-nate Tintagel Cornwall which you can see there. Many of the 7th century sites associated with Aquitania and Eware were monasteries like Whitehorn and South West Scotland. By contrast in Anglo-Saxon England, Merafyngiad and even the Vendell Baltic glass appears to be made in workshops principally for funerary purposes. Analyses largely show that the material used for glass beads commonly found in 6th century Merafyngiad graves included glass from the Levant and Further Field. Like the garnet trade these sources of glass spolia dried up in the early 7th century and local materials were used in said. Glass production must have declined substantially once the funerary right north and south of the Alps no longer consumed glass where. Glass production continued as the Piazza Madonna di Loretto kilns in Rome and the contemporary glass kiln at Glastonbury from the later 7th century show. Different scales both for making glass lighting and liturgical wares and here the glass associated with bead and the Frankish glaziers who made the windows at Jarrow are believed to have made these sorts of figurative windows at Jarrow. Again, East Mediterranean recycled glass. Glass in secular society was uncommon at the end of the 7th, early 8th centuries. Few tableware vessels occur in late 7th, early 8th century Dorishtat, Hamwich, Londonwich as on rural palaces such as the 7th century Northumbrian Palace of Yevry. In some as urban life ended in the Mediterranean and as Germanic funerary practice reached its Merafyngiad zenith was a prominent feature of cognitive practices but with the exception of Western Britain rarely used in daily life. As the funerary practice of placing grave goods with the dead ended in the later 7th century so the scale of glass making must have declined. Pyreun you might say was on at least the right track. All changed in the 780s and 790s. The selection of glass became a major feature of the so-called Carolingian Renaissance. Here we discover a clear intersection with Pyreun's thesis. Pyreun believed that the Carolingian Renaissance was the economic and social driver for making of the Middle Ages. As many of the archaeologists we look to urbanism rather than to the church and as such it has taken us a long time to grasp the significance of the church, the logical context for the revival not just of Latin Christendom but also regional economies. Palaces and here you see Salerno from the 770s, early 780s and you see the reconstruction of Arcan, the Charlemagne's palace from the late 8th century. Palaces and monasteries rather than towns drove the Renaissance as well as the Carolingian administrative reforms known as the Caractio. As Pyreun wrote these places were like the printing presses of the Renaissance. They were in effect the Facebook generators of the time. If you read the new Facebook globalization accounts they always look back to the printing presses where Pyreun was looking at the printing presses then the number of books coming out of these monasteries in the late 8th century was simply staggering. In a world without towns these were industrial centres. Frankish monasteries were re-envisioned between the 760s and 800s. Glass for windows and lamps formed an essential part of the remaking of Fulda, Lloir, Sandini, San Riquet, many others including late comers like Zalavare and Mosberg in western Hungary. It is a scale of the use of glass that remains unknown. The scale however is evident from our excavations at San Vincenzo and the Duchy of Benevento in southern Italy. Glaze tiles already formed a part of Prince Arrakis's later 8th century palace culture in Solano and doubtless it had windows too. Can we doubt that other Lombard and early Carolingian palaces were espousing the same use of exotic building materials? So, San Vincenzo, it begins in effect, is two generations after the beginning of the Carolingian reform movement. The reform monastery of the 780s with 14 monks that are registered as signatories in a deposition in 783 show that it was a substantial monastery that was rebuilt by 808 as a monastic city on the frontier between the Papal state and close to Montecasino and Benevento where it was located. Glaze formed an integral part of this iconographic concept. A glassmaker alongside Tyler, Smiths and Painters was a key presence in making the monastery. The glassmaker constructed a workshop in front of the atrium here. The first one is here and the second one is right here in the 790s and early 800s. The workshop included, and we shall see it by face, so there's a house and then tiny workshop bulkins like those from Glastonbury and other places, and then there's a chambering inserted into the whole setup with a workshop with a bulkin conceivably outside. The workshop was a stone-built construction which you can see here, eight and a half by six and a half. The workshop included a corner furnace with a chimney as well as a large central furnace consisted of an L shaped or tripartite structure with a central firing chamber and connecting ash pits. The kiln was probably domed, consisted of three tiers. The bottom story contained the fire, a single stoke hole. The middle contained crucibles, almost certainly, and was accessed by multiple glory holes, and the upper part was used to cool the finished vessels. That's our reconstruction of it. The workshop resembles the contemporary Abbasib workshop, excavated at Raqqa, as well as those depicted in Raban Maras' Day Universal, which is dated to circa 1023. Around it were prodigious amounts of glass waste, thousands of pieces, clippings, moys, reticelli roes, tesserae, crucible fragments with tesserae in glass in. Ian Freestone, Natalie Shillabeele, have shown that the glass was recycled Roman glass. Let's have a look. There's some of it from their publications. There's some of the window glass, the curving window, which you see here is part of the big, large glass that illuminated the staircase up to the Soloni in the Abbots Palace. The burnt glass you can see are from the windows, 15 windows on each side of the refectory. They were burnt down in 881. Reconstruction of the panels within their lead frame showed that the intention was to create a mosaic of light imitating opposite chtilel. That was the fundamental part of the iconographic concept. It was a renaissance concept. One small panel, and I think we have a picture here. Yes, you can see the panel with the ivory. One small panel looks to be an early attempt of figurative glasswork. You can see it actually inside its glass canes. These windows belong to a concept where we're investing in sacred consumption, in buildings and in their decoration, a decoration that is essentially renaissance and looks back from the floor to the ceiling, looks back at antiquity, creating painted marble on the lower walls, creating figurative panels with prophets and saints inside various marbled settings, and then windows, many of which are marbled as well in the same echoing style of creating the renaissance vision. Less than a generation later, Sam Vincenzo's ideological and economic strategy changed with the creation of a cult in the 820s imitating Pope Pascal's pilgrimage strategy for Rome. Sam Vincenzo's majority was fitted with a crypt in the 820s to house the relics of St Vincent that had been brought from Saragossa. The monastery invested now in sacred production rather than the buildings and their decor. The expression of the new strategy, and here you can see again this luminous attempt to create marbling and lighting, the expression of the new strategy was the collective workshop producing book furniture, enamels, fine metalwork and glassware, but now made only in bowl kilns. Given to donors as countergifts, we've hypothesised. So here are some of the various pieces including the book class that you can see on that side. The collective workshop also furnished materials, lamps now, tablewares, possibly window glass for the donors and their small churches until the monastery was sacked in 881. So two phases and that's significant. Sam Vincenzo, the Sam Vincenzo model of sacred consumption for the earliest Renaissance monasteries is followed by a phase of sacred production almost immediately because the first was late in the day in terms of the Carolingian world. The second is quite different as you can see because it includes elite guests, donors who are managed by a Chamberlain to come and visit the crypt and to give to the monastery. Giving to the monastery, they earned the right to have some place in the lay cemetery beyond the relics. The Spolia and many of the decorative concepts used in the Carolingian heartlands, but used here too, were lombard in origin and put to new use by the Frankish Benedictine reformers like Chrodigam of Metz and his followers. But following the Synod of Anion in 816 the reformers adapted the monasteries as regional central places, each with workshops as the plan of Saint-Gaul dating to about the schematic plan of Saint-Gaul dating to about 820 illustrates to champion the shift towards sacred production actively engaging with aristocratic donors and pilgrims. One significant footnote to the story was that Sam Vincenzo adopted around 800 the secondary products revolution. Its diet and dining was shaped accordingly. Glass chalices were used in the distinguished guest refectory and by the mid 9th century glass wine drinking vessels occur on Benevent and elite sites. Like the monastic transformation elite culinary and dining practices form part of the Carolingian revolution. Is it surprised then that a fine similar chalice more or less exactly like this has turned up at late 8th century Dorshtat and more drinking vessels occur from this era in Hamwych and Londonwych. Where did the glass come from? Scientific studies suggest a miscellany of sources and I'm sure we're going to hear many of them today from Eastern Mediterranean, from Eastern Europe and as well as from Italy. But we possess one clear cargo from this area from the port of Blu Trint, southern Albania where the excavations discovered you can see them on the Straits of Corfu and the western defences rather than the Acropolis amid Byzantine administrative centre where a consignment of glass was stored on the ground floor alongside stored southern Italian amphry. The stored glass included Egyptian vessels, thin-walled goblets and other vessels as well as coloured and waste from the Levant. It was a mixture of East Mediterranean vessels as East Mediterranean material not unlike the Sergei Lamanu wreck of two and a half centuries later. And those are some of the imported vessels. We can add one further detail. Both towers were burnt down in some conflagration. From their first floors we discover their quotidian culture notably their friendship cups according to Yonita Vroom which you can see these strange cups which she calls grole and chafing dishes. Glass was not part of these assemblages. As long distance Mediterranean commerce was minimal determined presumably by partnership the elephant in the room is where was the demand for the cargo. And so I've hypothesized some of the places. The demand was principally the revolution in construction created by the Benedictine reform movement. However one other aspect of this huge demand for recyclable glass in the late 8th century has ironically received far greater study because what I'm showing you is an immense and here I'm imitating Pyren an immense amount of glass from these places and it actually is the tail wagging the dog because it's the glass waste found in Dorschtat and there I say in front of Sorenreba and Birka in the late 8th century in surely excess traded material by Carolingian monasteries presumably from the central Rhineland. If Sam Vincenzo provides any measure this was a fraction of the surplus. It was translated as we I'm sure we will hear in the next talks into prestige goods sent to Scandinavia once in Rhiber, Caupang Birka was mostly transformed along with imported Abbasib factory made glass into colourful beads and I'm sure Soren who you can see in the picture he's grown older in the last three weeks as he closed the excavations you can see the massive beads that I'm sure he will be talking about. Now, few conclusions to return to Pyren. First glass was made on a small scale unlike early antiquity in the early medieval Levant from largely recycled materials between late antiquity and the late 8th century in Western Europe. By later Merovingian and Lombard times the role of the church in sustaining the craft was surely all-important. The role of glass changed in the mid to late 8th century when the early Carolingians melded Anglo-Saxon and Celtic monastic practices ideological practices to Lombard concepts of architecture and decor. What the Carolingians were doing were bringing in lots of clever ideas into their start-ups. It's rather like Californian. As Peter Brown wrote 180, 180 Episcable seas and 700 great monasteries in some 300 of which the emperor had a direct interest were refurbished. Beyond the world of traders and shabby gentility, Peter wrote Christianity covered Western Europe with a more diverse and fragile net and in so doing dotted the landscape with little portions of paradise. And that was what San Vincenzo was about. You were entering a conceptual realm and surely that was what Fuller was about a Sandini or Lorsha wherever you wish to be. Central to this renaissance was a cultural revolution involving a new materialism. The density of the entangle relations between people and things including glass increased with new technologies that worked directly on all aspects of life. Any engagement with these changing conditions of existence involved movement from one place to another. Movement not for trade so much which of course is what I've focused on in the past but pilgrimage as Mike McCormack has shown was a major characteristic of the Charlemagne world view. This led to the re-envisaging of Rome itself. As a pilgrimage centre as a pilgrimage destination Rome became what France, Frantheos calls a transactional meeting place and I've likened it to Mount Athos. Square miles of ancient metropolis were abandoned to fields and wilderness. This new role involved this new role involved the refurbishing of building and churches under Pope's Hadrian and then Leo and as Paola de Lago has pointed out the Libra Pontificalis plus now countless excavations demonstrate that the late 8th century ruins were mined for Spolia. Here you can see the spectacular Cryptobalby lime kiln outside which they found in the 1980s this huge pile of Roman sculpture waiting to be burnt. You can imagine how the Italians and the Romans treated this so they removed all the sculpture and so all you see is the lime kiln but as has been pointed out the one characteristic of late 8th, early 9th century archaeology in Rome are the pits for Spolia and the lime kilns. There's an excellent essay by Ricardo Sant'Angeli Valenciani on these. Marba was burnt in the lime kilns for cement for rebuilding programmes and the new churches and you can see the front of Prosedi and the inside of Santa Prosedi with its tessary start sometime in the second decade of the 9th century. So there's a period of rebuilding and then a period of genuine construction with new crypts, the so-called Roman crypts. As Chris Rickham has contended Charlemagne's eye on Rome was for its ideological significance not as a seat of trade. Indeed Mediterranean mercantile trade was minuscule in scale by comparison with North Sea trade at this time. Rome, the new liturgy and the new vaunting glazed buildings of Italy served as a political bastion until the eight tans against the expansionist threat of Byzantium hence the purpose in its first phase of San Vincenso. The cultural revolution called for the reintroduction of tableware in the early 9th century. Palm cuts and funnel beakers in the North Sea Emporia elegant chalices, wine glasses such as I've shown you from San Vincenso and Dorschtat, glass shown here with gofoil decoration abasid in its visual intention occur at San Vincenso, Dorschtat and even Borg in the Arctic Circles Lafotes and Islands. These glasses contain sage more durable drinking glasses from the 9th century elite rural sites of central Italy and the beginnings of glazed ware in central Italy which our new ERC project is dating to around the 840s. There's a sudden wave that goes with the sacred production of new materials and huge quantities being produced and distributed to elite sites which the classic is Don Oractico just north of Pionbino. One final point who were the innovators? Significant research has been carried out to show that soda ash glass making was to become the norm succeeding glass made from nature. Invention in other words became an elemental feature of Charlemagne's legacy. Who organised this? Who were these craftsmen and culture revolutionaries? These were George De Be's third order. We find them in the Mercantile centres in the North Sea. We now find them in the monasteries particularly as permanent residents from the sacred production period. Sam Vincenza's glass workshop suggests the artisan understood Abbasid operating principles given if he was using recycled glass. The scale and proficiency are so different from the bowl kiln production that characterised glass production before and indeed afterwards. So with this thought let's finally return to Pyren. Pyren is remembered for his phrase without Mojave and Charlemagne would have been inconceivable. This was not the case. The Mediterranean economy collapsed before the Arabs took North Africa. Rather we need to focus upon Pyren's perspicacious assertion that the Carolingian Empire or rather the Empire of Charlemagne was the scaffolding of the Middle Ages. The state upon which it was founded was extremely weak and was presently crumble. But the Empire would survive as a higher unity of Western Christendom. Glass helped to create the Empire of Charlemagne but was to become only one component part of the subsequent sacred production strategy itself and into Medso. By the 840s, as I've mentioned already secular monastic donors increasingly became the drivers of the post-Carolingian world. Were Pyren alive today given his fascination with Flemish textile production he would have been intrigued by the role of glassmaker artisans. Pyren, after all, championed the monks who chronicled the Renaissance. The many writers are all listed in Muhammad and Charlemagne. The artisans, part of Dubey's Third Order, were the agents who created an inalainable wealth or benefit for these places. Their legacy was the huge surge in materialism that accompanied the rise of feudal lordship as the monastic world to site Pyren crumbled. Was it Abbasid science and even Abbasid artisans who played a critical if undocumented part in creating transactional places like the monasteries? If there is any relationship between Muhammad and Charlemagne it is to be sought. It is whatever whoever these individuals were is to be sought with them. They introduced the demand for the colour of glass which had an impact beyond Latin Christendom reaching far as we shall see today I'm sure into the Baltic Sea. Thank you.