Robert H. Brill
Robert Brill is an American archaeologist, best known for his work on the chemical analysis of ancient glass. Born in the US in 1929, Brill attended West Side High School in Newark, New Jersey, before going on to study for his B.S. degree at Upsala College. Having completed his Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Rutgers University in 1954, Brill returned to Upsala College to teach chemistry. In 1960, he joined the staff of the Corning Museum of Glass as their second research scientist.
Throughout his career at Corning, where a four-year directorship punctuated his time as a research scientist, Brill was a forerunner in the scientific investigation of glass, glazes and colorants, developing and challenging the usefulness of emerging techniques. His pioneering work with the application of lead and oxygen isotope analysis in archaeology led him occasionally to add the investigation of metal objects to his portfolio so that, together, his published works number more than 160. Perhaps the most famous of these is his Chemical Analyses of Early Glass, a sum of his 39 years of work and now a seminal reference guide in the field.
Since 1982, Brill has served on the International Commission on Glass. Within this, he founded TC17, the technical committee for the Archaeometry of Glass, which lists among its aims the ‘promotion of collaboration among glass specialists in widely separated countries’ and the stimulation and encouragement of glass scientists ‘in developing countries’. His internationalism is aptly demonstrated by his study of glasses from around the world, with his attentions most recently being focused on those from the Silk Road. It seems he was attracted by the lack of previous study and the need for further development in the field. Seeing a disparity between contemporary knowledge of glasses from the western world and those from East Asia, Brill was keen to add insight to a hitherto unexploited field and, as such, has gone on to contribute a great deal to Silk Road studies.The 1960s
The 1960s saw Brill beginning to develop the analytical techniques that would define the early years of his career at Corning, and yet the scope of his interest within glass remained vast. Indeed, 1961 saw Brill pen a letter to Nature with a colleague, that was a ‘bombshell’, according to Newton, in the field of glass-dating. Here Brill suggested that the rather enigmatic weathering crust found to form on buried glass objects over time could be used to date the object in a method rather similar to dendrochronology, using the separate layers of the shiny lamination. Whilst in dendrochronology the tree-rings account simply for the tree's annual growth, in the weathering crust on glass Brill suggested the accumulation of a layer of laminate might respond to some kind of annual event of climatic change. Unfortunately, despite the examples of the method's successful applications provided by Brill, such as the almost accurate count of 156 layers on a bottle-base from the York River submerged in 1781 and excavated in 1935, the technique largely failed to convince and did not see widespread adoption.Isotope analysis
The most important of these techniques would prove to be Brill's pioneering application of lead isotope analysis, hitherto used only in geology, to archaeological objects. Brill first presented this idea at the 1965 Seminar in Examination of Works of Art, held at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, but the first widely published account of the method seems to be Brill and Wampler's 1967 article in the American Journal of Archaeology. Here, Brill and Wampler outlined how the technique could be used to provenance the lead contents of archaeological objects to lead ore sources around the world, based on the isotopic signature of various leads, which relates them to ‘ores occurring in different geographical areas’. These different areas have different signatures because they are of varying geological age, something reflected by the individual lead isotopes which form only after the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. While the lead isotope ratios used for provenancing are different, they are not unique: areas geologically similar will yield similar lead isotope signatures. Furthermore, if leads were salvaged and mixed in ancient times, the isotope ratio will be compromised. Aside from these two limitations, there is little else that could affect the lead isotope reading an object would yield. As such, Brill's method was greeted enthusiastically and he went on to develop the technique, as well as oxygen isotope analysis, in his 1970 publication. Here he demonstrated how the technique could be used both to classify early glasses and to a certain extent characterize the ingredients from which they were made.In 1965, Brill launched another important innovation in glass analysis, the comparison of interlaboratory experiments in order to verify analytical results. ‘Originally inspired by a plea from W E S Turner’, according to Freestone, Brill first mooted his idea at the VIIth International Congress on Glass, in Brussels. It wasn’t until the VIIIth International Congress on Glass in 1968, however, that Brill fully launched his concept of an ‘analytical round robin’, having distributed a number of reference glasses to be tested in different laboratories using a range of current techniques including X-ray fluorescence and neutron activation analysis. When discussing his motive for the experiment, Brill aptly stated: 'The truth is that the chemical analysis of glasses is a difficult undertaking and still remains in some senses an art'. By conducting the round robin experiment, Brill hoped the results gathered from different laboratories would help ‘correlate earlier results’ and ‘calibrate future analyses in reference to one another’, as well as suggest which out of the analytical procedures used was the most accurate and effective. The results of the round robin were presented at the 'IXth International Congress on Glass' in 1971, and showed that, as Brill suspected, there was poor agreement between certain identified elements, and therefore these might be ‘troublesome’ generally across analyses. These included calcium, aluminium, lead and barium, among others. Aside from their correctional potential, the results, from 45 different laboratories in 15 countries, also provided an enormous data set from which, Brill suggested, the participants could ‘evaluate their own methods and procedures against the findings of other analysts’. At the time, Brill could hardly have suspected that the data would go on to have such great import, but Croegaard's generation of preferred glass compositions, from statistical analysis of the data, were used successfully by many people until Brill's own reference guide was published in 1999.The Middle East
Brill made various trips to the Middle East, including accompanying Theodore Wertime's 1968 survey of the ancient technologies of Iran, alongside other great minds such as the noted ceramicist, Frederick Matson. In the years 1963-1964, the Corning Museum of Glass and the University of Missouri, following a long history of excavation at the necropolis of Beth She'Arim, conducted an examination of a huge slab of glass, some 2000 years old, that had been languishing in an ancient cistern. Brill cannot recall who first suggested this slab, measuring 3.4m by 1.94m, could be made of glass, but the only way to test it was to drill a core through its 45 cm thickness and analyse it. On analysis of the core, Brill found that the glass was devitrified and stained, and not very homogenous, with a presence of wollastonite crystals throughout. Investigation of the manufacture technology required to produce the slab, suggested that in order to produce such a slab of glass, it would have been necessary to heat over eleven tons of batch material, and sustain it at around 1050˚C for between five and ten days ! His initial interpretation was that the glass must have been heated either from above or from the sides using a kind of tank furnace; a hypothesis that was proven accurate when excavation underneath the slab suggested it had been melted in situ, in a tank whose floor was a bed of limestone blocks with a thin parting layer of clay. Brill's interpretation, that the slab and its surroundings suggest ‘some early form of reverberatory furnace’ was the first suggestion of the use of tank furnaces in early glassmaking. The evidence at Beth She’arim encouraged further innovative thought because whilst the slab represented glass production on a grand scale, no associated evidence for glass working was found. Brill had already suspected that historical glassmaking occurred in two phases, the heavy ‘engineering’ stage when the glass is formed from the batch ingredients and the ‘crafting’ stage when the glass is formed into artefacts. These stages could occur in combination at one location, or at two differing locales, and the time span of production after the initial glass melt is highly flexible. For Brill, the idea of this ‘dual nature of all glassmaking’ was ‘crystallized’ at Beth She’Arim, where only the raw glass production was represented, and would be reinforced later by the contrasting evidence, where working was favoured over production, found at Jalame, as discussed below.The 1970s
Aside from the aforementioned published results of his analytical round robin and his lead and oxygen isotope studies in the early 1970s, the 1970s saw Brill publish comparatively little, perhaps due to his post as director at The Corning Museum of Glass. Those publications he did pen are largely concerned with the development of lead isotope analysis and are listed in the further reading section. Alas, before Brill could be named Director, however, the museum was to be blighted by an enormous flood, ‘possibly the greatest single catastrophe borne by an American museum’ according to Buechner, Brill's successor in 1976.