A rare glass bowl, dating form the late 5th or early 6th century, has been retrieved intact from an Anglo-Saxon burial site in the New Forest area of Hampshire. The bowl, which was found by an English Heritage conservator, was inside one of six wooden buckets buried with skeletons in the graves and was probably imported all the way from the Rhineland. The fragile bowl is pale green with delicate white trails on the outside and measures about five inches across and one and a half inches high. A non-destructive X-ray analysis of the bowl revealed that the glass, made of soda-lime-silica, had been melted in a furnace and blown and shaped on the end of a blowing iron. Opaque white trails, coloured with tin and lead, were added below the rim and pressed into the glass. The bowl is mostly found in the Rhineland and rarely appears in Britain.
