  In addition of a flow, plastic deformation of structural glasses (in
particular amorphous silica) is characterized by a permanent densification.
Raman spectroscopic estimators are shown to give a full account of the plastic
behavior of silica under pressure. While the permanent densification of silica
has been widely discussed in terms of amorphous-amorphous transition, from a
plasticity point of view, the evolution of the residual densification with the
maximum pressure of a pressure cycle can be discussed as a density hardening
phenomenon. In the framework of such a mechanical aging effect, we propose that
the glass structure could be labelled by the maximum pressure experienced by
the glass and that the saturation of densification could be associated with the
densest packing of tetrahedra only linked by their vertices.
