Floors in Greek luxury villa were laid with recycled glass

Several decorative mosaic floors have been excavated in a luxury villa located in present-day Turkey, once overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. New chemical analyzes reveal that recycled glass was used in laying the mosaic floors. Although this 1700 years old luxury villa was excavated and examined both in 1856 and in the 1990s, it still has secrets to reveal. New secrets have now been revealed by an international research team, with Professor Kaare Lund Rasmussen leading the so called archaeometric analyses: using chemical analysis to determine which elements an object was made of, how it has been processed, etc. Others in the team are Thomas Delbey from Cranfield University in England and the classical archaeologists Birte Poulsen and Poul Pedersen from Aarhus University and SDU. The team's work is published in the journal Heritage Science , including archaeometric analysis of 19, approximately, 1600 years old mosaic tesserae. One of seven wonders of the world.