Faience is the first man-made non-clay ceramic. It originated around 6000 years ago and is made of a quartz core with a glazed surface aimed to imitate the shine of semi-precious stones like turquoise and lapis lazuli. It was used to make amulets, beads and even architectural features like tiles.
Faience objects have been found all over Nubia (ancient Sudan) including at Meroe, the royal capital of the powerful Meroitic Kingdom. This includes finds from the city itself as well as from the royal pyramids: surprisingly, there are more pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt.
Juliet's research focuses on ancient vitreous materials like glass and faience, and understanding the techniques used in producing these materials. For her PhD, she investigated glass discovered in Nubia to contextualise Nubia within the broader framework of ancient glassmaking, glass-working, and glass commerce. Her work also involves looking at artefacts to determine their origins: glass from different regions has a different composition due to natural variations in the raw materials used.
“Faience is quite a mysterious ancient technology," Juliet recounts the mystifying nature of this vitreous material. “There's just one picture that we know of in one tomb that might be showing the manufacturing process."
Meeting ISIS instrument scientist Adrian Hillier at a conference in Liverpool was a turning point in her research. Adrian was talking about using muons to study coins from ancient Rome. Similar to X-rays, and unlike microscopy, muons are able to non-destructively penetrate samples and provide an in-depth method for profiling material structures. Unlike X-rays, they don't irradiate the material being studied, and different energies can be applied to different depths of the material. The momentum of muons can be controlled precisely; and this gives one the chance to find out an object's internal composition by penetrating beneath the surface.
Usually, to study structure of the glazes and the production process of faience, researchers need to cut samples up. Recalling her breakthrough, Juliet says, “I had a lightbulb moment – faience has different layers. Can we look at it with muons?"
She then conducted a pilot study in 2024 using a piece of broken faience tile and compared the muon results with destructive techniques and the X-ray pioneered scanning electron microscopy. After the success of the pilot study, she then returned to ISIS in 2025 with a royal shabti from the Garstang Museum of Archaeology, Liverpool.
Shabtis were artefacts constructed from a variety of material such as wood, stone and faience, and were placed in tombs for the deceased in the afterlife. This particular shabti belonged to King Analamani (c.620–600BCE) of the kingdom of Nubia.
“It's opening up new possibilities of looking at ancient artefacts without destructively sampling. We can look at a new range of objects, such as those that are unique or unbroken."
This was the first time the shabti had been chemically analysed – and preliminary results showed that it had a very high-quality body material – immensely pure when compared to other faience objects – with a copper, turquoise colour glazed exterior.
Pondering over future applications, Juliet says, “I am considering how we could use muons for glass. We could look at experimentally made glass vs ancient glass of the recipe we used." This technique could also be further utilised to look at corroded glass, studying the differences in the layers of this glass and the deterioration going down.
"Thanks to the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) for approving and funding this experiment," says Juliet. "Also, many thanks to Dr Adrian Hillier and Dr Sayani Biswas for all their help before, during, and after the experiment and to Dr Gina Criscenzo Laycock of the Garstang Museum of Archaeology for access to the objects examined."
