Casas, L.; Di Febo, R.; Anglisano, A.; Pitarch Martí, Á.; Queralt, I.; Carreras, C.; Fouzai, B. New Strategies in Archaeometric Provenance Analyses of Volcanic Rock Grinding Stones: Examples from Iulia Libica (Spain) and Sidi Zahruni (Tunisia). Minerals2024, 14, 639.
Casas, L.; Di Febo, R.; Anglisano, A.; Pitarch Martí, Á.; Queralt, I.; Carreras, C.; Fouzai, B. New Strategies in Archaeometric Provenance Analyses of Volcanic Rock Grinding Stones: Examples from Iulia Libica (Spain) and Sidi Zahruni (Tunisia). Minerals 2024, 14, 639.
Casas, L.; Di Febo, R.; Anglisano, A.; Pitarch Martí, Á.; Queralt, I.; Carreras, C.; Fouzai, B. New Strategies in Archaeometric Provenance Analyses of Volcanic Rock Grinding Stones: Examples from Iulia Libica (Spain) and Sidi Zahruni (Tunisia). Minerals2024, 14, 639.
Casas, L.; Di Febo, R.; Anglisano, A.; Pitarch Martí, Á.; Queralt, I.; Carreras, C.; Fouzai, B. New Strategies in Archaeometric Provenance Analyses of Volcanic Rock Grinding Stones: Examples from Iulia Libica (Spain) and Sidi Zahruni (Tunisia). Minerals 2024, 14, 639.
Abstract
Archaeometry can help archaeologists in multiple instances, one of the common archaeometric goals are the provenance analyses. Volcanic stones appear frequently in archaeological sites as materials used to build grinding tools like millstones and mortars or as building materials. Petrographic characterization is commonly applied to identify their main mineralogical components. However, provenance of volcanic stones is usually undertaken by comparison with geochemical data from reference outcrops using common descriptive statistical tools such as biplots of chemical elements, and unsupervised multivariate data analysis like principal component analysis (PCA). Recently, the use of supervised classification methods has shown a superior performance in assigning provenance to archaeological samples. However, these methods require the use of reference databases for every possibly provenance class to be able to train the used classification algorithms. The existence of comprehensive collections of published geochemical analyses of igneous rocks enables the use of the supervised approach for provenance determination of volcanic stones. In this paper, the provenance of volcanic grinding tools from two archaeological sites (Iulia Libica, Spain and Sidi Zahruni, Tunisia) is attempted using data from the GEOROC Database through unsupervised and supervised approaches.
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Geochemistry and Petrology
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