Provenance of White Marbles from the Roman City of Tauriana (Palmi, Reggio Calabria, Italy)

Raffaella De Luca,Andrea Bloise,Marco Lezzerini,Domenico Miriello,Maria Maddalena Sica,Rocco Dominici,Donatella Barca

doi:10.3390/min10040297

Abstract

The work shows the results of an archaeometric study performed on fourteen white marble samples from the Roman city of Tauriana (Palmi, Reggio Calabria, Italy), belonging to different architectural elements of the Municipal Museum Complex and artifacts reused in the modern town. Samples were studied by optical microscopy (OM), x-ray powder diffraction (XRPD), and isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) of 13C and 18O with the aim to identify their provenance. The comparison between the collected data and the historical ones, concerning the ancient quarries of white marble of the Mediterranean area, allowed us to prove that most of the marbles used in the city of Tauriana were from the Apuan Alps Basin (Carrara) and, in few cases, from Minor Asia (Proconnesos, Aphrodisias, Docimium) and Greek (Thasos and Pentelic) quarries.

Highlights

The Roman city of Tauriana is located in the south of Calabria, few kilometers from the town ofPalmi, a municipality of about 20,000 inhabitants in the province of Reggio Calabria, in southern Italy (Figure 1a)
The mineralogical and petrographic characterization of the fourteen white marble samples from the city of Tauriana revealed that Carrara marble is the most used rock for many of the analyzed artifacts
It was identified in the columns present in the Museum garden, which belong to the early Imperial Age

Summary

Introduction

The Roman city of Tauriana is located in the south of Calabria, few kilometers from the town ofPalmi, a municipality of about 20,000 inhabitants in the province of Reggio Calabria, in southern Italy (Figure 1a). The Roman city of Tauriana is located in the south of Calabria, few kilometers from the town of. The area is characterized by a plateau overlooking the sea, dominated by a sighting tower of the 16th century, with anti-Saracen function (Figure 1b). After a period of emptiness, at the end of the 4th century BC, the Italic people of the Taurians founded, along the valley of the Métauros River (today Petrace River), one of the strategic centers of their extensive settlement system. During the 2nd century BC, after the second Punic war, where the Taurians supported the Romans against the Carthaginians, there was a period of great transformations and the city underwent a first urban planning intervention, attested by the archaeological documentation and the brick stamps showing the ethnic “Tayrianoym” [3]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion