“…The next step in empirical soil provenancing is the comparison of the evidentiary soil sample's composition with the selected database. Statistical analysis of differences can be performed using a few or many compositional characteristics (including chemical element abundances, isotopes, mineral abundances), their ratios or other calculated indexes, correlation analysis, and/or factor or principal component analysis (e.g., [ 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 ]), among others.…”