At the end of last year, curators from Oxford's Ashmolean Museum brought a small, roughly 2,000-year-old chariot fitting to Diamond Light Source, the UK's synchrotron facility. They wanted to learn more about the prehistoric artifact, and researchers examined it using the microfocus beamline at I18.
Those measurements identified the glass as Egyptian, showing that the material had travelled from Egypt to Iron Age Britain. The result offers evidence that Egyptian glass reached far northern Europe, and it gives researchers a clearer picture of the craft techniques used by Iron Age makers.
The analysis also prompted the team to redetermine how the fitting is understood, updating its place in the collection. The findings were reported by Phys.org.