Material study of Early Byzantine Cypriot wall mosaics

Early Christian churches and basilicas in Cyprus were richly adorned with costly wall-mosaics constituted of tesserae set in a plaster attached to the wall. Many tesserae were made of coloured and opacified glass which bear ample testimony of the perfection in craftsmanship achieved by ancient glassmakers and give insight into the trade of raw materials in the Eastern Mediterranean region. The plaster is crucial for the good conservation of the mosaic and had to be adapted depending on the local weathering factors and the locally available materials. The investigation of both artificial materials provides a holistic description of the organisation of mosaic production in Early Byzantine Cyprus.

The analyses presented were made while working as part of the NARNIA ("New Archaeological Research Network for Integrating Approaches to ancient material studies") at the University of Cyprus, funded by the Marie Curie ITN grant agreement no.: 265010.

The travel to the conference was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2176 'Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures', project no. 390893796. A presentation on the research conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg was also presented at the same conference: https://www.fdr.uni-hamburg.de/record/12422