Brills submissions to the XIVth International Congress on Glass, which took place in New Delhi in 1986, can be seen to represent the origins of his work on the Great Silk Road, the impressive trade route carrying goods from the East through India to Europe. Here, chemical analysis of Early Indian glasses helped Brill determine the ingredients and techniques of production, ‘to make certain broad generalizations as to regions or periods of manufacture’, and therefore to follow an objects movement along the trade route (1987, 1). For the XIVth Congress, Brill conducted atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS) and optical emission spectroscopy (OES) on samples of 38 glasses from India, and the success of his method was made clear when he was able to separate 21 samples away from those made in the Middle East and Europe (Brill 1987). The glasses were shown to have mixed alkali compositions, a feature that is ‘rare among glasses from more westerly sources’, and therefore Brill concluded that they had definitely been manufactured in India (1987, 4). Brill also collaborated with Mckinnon to conduct chemical analyses of some glass samples from Sumatra, Indonesia, the results of which would be the ‘first data of their kind from this island’ (1987, 1). The results of the study, which also used samples from Java, another important location for the Silk Road, were hoped by McKinnon and Brill to ‘stimulate a greater awareness of glass in the economy [...] of ancient Sumatra and further new lines of research in the archaeology of the region’ (1987, 1).