specialized products using glass inlays, notably the ornamentalfittings of
wooden funerary couches, which have been found at a number of major
Macedonian centres, including Aineia in Chalkidike.^99 These items were
intrinsically delicate, and unsuitable for long distance transportation.
They are the kinds of products best made as close as possible to their
place of use, so Ignatiadou’s interpretation of these as locally made items
is persuasive and the source of natron in the nearby lake certainly very
plausible.
Techniques of glassmaking are also connected, albeit indirectly, to the
manufacture of pigments. Many of the colours used in tomb painting,
which provides the largest source of information about pigments in
Thrace and Macedonia, are composed of earth colours—red and yellow
ochres; charcoal or similar sources of carbon for black and grey tones;
chalk and kaolinite for white. These are widely available, but would have
been cleaned and prepared to a high concentration. The earliest‘syn-
thetic’pigment was blue, whose purest form was Egyptian blue, made of
copper and calcium silicate. The commonest form of this man-made
mixture of minerals is blue glass, and was usually imported from
Egypt.^100 Egyptian blue has now been identified in a large number of
painted schemes in tombs of the north Aegean.^101 Blue appears in tomb
decoration as an occasional colour, essentially a supplement to less
expensive, more accessible earth tones. Blue was one of the most prized
colours for Greek temple decoration alongside red, so the demand for
blue was strong, widespread, and persistent, even if small quantities were
used in individual locations. Blue ought therefore to be a trace element of
exchange patterns.
Most of the colours used as pigments were applied in small quantities
onto a lime or lime and chalk base-coat. Lime plaster was the commonest
form of wall decoration, with or without additional colours. Lime is
therefore likely to have been the commonest type of alkali available for
general purposes and a lime compound was the most straightforward
mordant forfixing the colours of textiles. Slaked lime (calcium hydrox-
ide, Ca(OH) 2 ) was used for this purpose at a range of Bronze Age sites in
(^99) Aineia Tomb I: fragments of glass and ivory (Vokotopoulou 1990, pl. 9a, especially
the sheet and fragments of eye and leaf pattern, pl. 9ª,ä); Tomb II: (ibid. pls 18–20); Tomb
III and pyre in the same mound: (ibid. pls 51–53, especially pls 51óôand 52ª;83fig. 43).
(^100) Riederer 1997.
(^101) Brecoulaki and Perdikatsis 2002; Brecoulaki et al. 2006, 309; Tsimbidou-Avloniti
2005, 199 (Egyptian blue mixed with‘bone black’); Ivanova 2011, 40–1, reviews evidence
from tombs in the interior of Thrace with traces of Egyptian blue: (in chronological order)
Ostrusha, Kran, Muglish, Kazanlak, as well as a fragment from Adjiyska Vodenitsa, Vetren,
identified with Pistiros (ibid. 43 and pl. 6).
180 Thelongue duréein the north Aegean