The glass was produced by the same recipe
all over the Roman Empire and its chemical
composition varied in a narrow range. There
is no consensus whether the base glass was
produced in few centres and then distributed for
further processing, or base glass was produced in
many glass-making workshops keeping the recipe
strictly. This paper is the first to report about
chemical composition of glass objects unearthed
from Roman time glass-making workshops in Pannonia,
contributing to the above mentioned dispute.
One of the 5 studied transparent glass objects found
in a glass-making workshop in Brigetio (now Komárom–
Szőny in Hungary) is potash glass, which
was probably made in the early modern era and
mixed accidentally to the Roman objects. The other
4 transparent and translucent glass objects are
of typical Roman base glass in composition. The
base fragment of a very high quality bowl does not
contain deliberately added manganese, while all
the other transparent fragments are decolourised
by manganese. This high quality glass bowl was
probably made in another workshop in the Roman
Empire or in Pannonia as the style of the object
indicates it as well.
The opaque white and opaque yellow glasses
were opacified by calcium-antimonate and leadantimonate
respectively according to the common
practice in the Roman Empire
