The challenge of a successful discrimination of ancient marbles (part I): A databank for the marbles from Paros, Prokonnesos, Heraklea/Miletos and Thasos

Abstract

The present paper offers a solution of the latent problems regarding the discrimination of the marbles from Prokonnesos, Heraklea/Miletos, Paros, and Thasos. As the conventional approaches primarily rest on basic petrographic characteristics and stable isotope results, they do not sufficiently discriminate between these varieties of marbles. Therefore the procedure proposed here is exclusively based on different methods of chemical analysis. Applying the results of isotope analyses, a large number of trace element analyses and the analyses of the micro-inclusions of the marbles, a more or less complete separation of the data-fields of the marbles under consideration was achieved. The single, numerical data of the quarry samples are given in the “Supplementary Online Material”. When using these data as reference databank for provenance analysis of unknown artefacts, it is of central importance that the same procedure must be adopted as is applied here. This affects in particular the decomposition procedure of the powder samples before the analysis which is described here in detail. In any case a data evaluation with the help of a multivariate statistical treatment of a large number of variables is indispensable.