Mineralogical-petrographic and geochemical characteristics of calcarenites from coastal quarries of the Salento Peninsula: A contribution to the study of their exploitation in the past

The coast of Salento, from Eganzia to Tarante, is full of quarries mostly placed within calcarenite deposits. Usually they are little or medium sized quarries. However, they show evidences of an intensive past explotation of these calcarenite materials. Currently, they are completely abandoned and most of them are partially or totally submerged, which makes it difficult to identify them. A mineralogicalpetrographic study has been started. The results have been compared with other ones achieved from the costitutive materials of some archaeological and historical-architectural evidences present in the surrounding area. Geochemical analyses have provided further elements about the correlation between materials from the quarries and artefatcs. This study, that has been carried out on only some of the quarries and of the artefacts, allowed to work out meaningful elements for the characterization of the quarry materials and for the identification of provenance of the materials constituting the artefatcs. This gives a contribution to the recostruction of the history of the extraction activities in this region.