New considerations on trace elements for quarry provenance investigation of ancient white marbles

Until now, the use of trace elements to discriminate among differing provenances of classical white marbles from Mediterranean areas have produced controversial results, and the many drawbacks of this approach have been widely discussed. The behavior of trace elements was tested, aiming to determine their effectiveness for provenance purposes. In this work, in particular, representative specimens of fine-grained white marbles from quarries at Carrara, Penteli, Paros, Afyon and Göktepe were analyzed by Laser Ablation ICP-MS. LA-ICP-MS is recent analytical technique, which allows high-precision measurement of a large number of elements in given points in solid samples without any pre-treatment. The results and their statistical treatment showed that many elements, such as Mn, Y, V, Pb and Th, can be used as interesting markers in that they can identify marbles from different sites. In addition, other elements may be useful in singling out one specific quarry district, such as Zr for Paros, Sr for Göktepe or Mg for Carrara. Trace elements determination may be very promising as a method of assigning unknown marble artifacts to a clearly identified quarry and LA-ICP-MS analytical technique may partly solve the problem of incomparability of the data published in past studies.