Rakow Grant for Glass Research
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Dr. Thilo Rehren, research scientist at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum in Bochum, Germany, was awarded the 1998 Rakow Grant for Glass Research for a study of Late Bronze Age (LBA) glassmaking.
“The stunning homogeneity of LBA base glass chemistry from Egypt and beyond is a long-known fact,” Dr. Rehren stated in his application for the grant. “The project attempts to explain this as the result of a self-adjusting, temperature-controlled partial melting of the batch, in equilibrium with excess earth-alkaline oxides.”
Dr. Rehren conducted a study of technical literature on batch melting processes and equilibrium reactions, using the resources of the Rakow Library of The Corning Museum of Glass. In addition, he planned to make an analytical investigation of glassmaking debris from Lisht (in the Egyptian collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Qantir (in the %%Roemer%%- und Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim, Germany).
Dr. Rehren received his Ph.D. in petrology and volcanology from Freiburg University (Germany) in 1988. One year later, he held a research fellowship in archeometallurgy at Oxford University. From 1990 to 1992, he worked as a research assistant in the Department of Archeometallurgy at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum, where he was named to his post as research scientist in 1993. His study of a glass workshop within a copper-centered industrial complex in LBA Egypt was published in The Prehistory and History of Glassmaking Technology (Ceramics and Civilization, v. 8) in 1998.