Obsidians from Latium Settlements: Preliminary Study on Provenance and Supplying Dynamics Indexes

There are essentially six sources for obsidians in the Mediterranean Basin: Mount Arci in Sardinia, the islands of Lipari and Pantelleria in Sicily and Palmarola in Latium, as well as the islands of Melos and Gyali in the south-eastern part of Greece. Identification and quantification of principal and trace elements which compose this volcanic glass allow source tracking. The present study proposes a investigation methodology, which was developed on a sample set composed by archaeological obsidian findings from Neolithic sites in Latium; three different analytical techniques are compared: SEM-EDXS, ED-XRF and LA-ICP-MS, in order to gather a wide data set to be compared with data in literature and to be processed by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for assigning a provenance to each find.