New considerations on trace elements for quarry provenance investigation of ancient white marbles

tUntil now, the use of trace elements to discriminate among differing provenances of classical whitemarbles from Mediterranean areas have produced controversial results, and the many drawbacks of thisapproach have been widely discussed. The behavior of trace elements was tested, aiming to determinetheir effectiveness for provenance purposes. In this work, in particular, representative specimens of fine-grained white marbles from quarries at Carrara, Penteli, Paros, Afyon and Göktepe were analyzed by LaserAblation ICP-MS. LA-ICP-MS is recent analytical technique, which allows high-precision measurementof a large number of elements in given points in solid samples without any pre-treatment. The resultsand their statistical treatment showed that many elements, such as Mn, Y, V, Pb and Th, can be used asinteresting markers in that they can identify marbles from different sites. In addition, other elementsmay be useful in singling out one specific quarry district, such as Zr for Paros, Sr for Göktepe or Mg forCarrara. Trace elements determination may be very promising as a method of assigning unknown marbleartifacts to a clearly identified quarry and LA-ICP-MS analytical technique may partly solve the problemof incomparability of the data published in past studies