Calcite alabaster artifacts from Hierapolis in Phrygia, Turkey: Provenance determination using carbon and oxygen stable isotopes

Abstract

Alabastro fiorito or listato, a vividly colored and strongly patterned carbonate stone, is widely diffused in the ancient city of Hierapolis in Phrygia (Turkey) as building material. This stone, also known as Hierapolis alabaster, was extensively quarried in antiquity in the territory near the city. Numerous ancient quarries of the Hierapolis alabaster were documented in previous studies in sites immediately around the city and also about 13 km northwest of Hierapolis, near Gölemezli. Carbon and oxygen stable isotopes and X‐ray diffraction (XRD) analysis were used to investigate the possibility to discriminate different quarries or different geographically coherent extraction areas; these techniques were also applied to analyze alabaster artifacts from some monuments of Hierapolis as a case study. The data show that carbon and oxygen isotopes may be effective at distinguishing between the quarries of Gölemezli and Hierapolis, and allow for attribution of unknown alabaster artifacts to one of these areas. The possibility to identify the provenance of unknown alabasters from the different extraction sites or geographically coherent extraction areas near Hierapolis using isotopes only is difficult; in some cases XRD analysis to detect aragonite versus calcite may improve the discrimination among Hierapolitan quarries and contribute to the assignment procedure.

The Provenance of Marbles and Alabasters Used in the Monuments of Hierapolis in Phrygia (Turkey): New Information from a Systematic Review and Integration of Archaeological and Archaeometric Data

“…The calcite alabaster quarried in the northern side of the Lykos valley, manly close to Hierapolis but also near the modern village of Gölemezli and the ancient city of Tripolis, was available in varieties that are both coloured (listato and fiorito, generally depending on whether the stone is cut along or against the grain) and completely white (ghiaccione). This calcite alabaster is a compact banded and translucent calcium carbonate stone; in geological terms, it is defined banded travertine [43] (p. 2). In particular, listato alabaster is characterized by veining in more or less densely packed bands, both linear and undulating, with a wide range of shades, among which the most frequent are yellow, reddish brown and rusty red, while fiorito has rounded inclusions of the same colours.…”

“…However, this extraction area seems larger than the Gölemezli quarries, but much smaller than the quarrying areas close to Hierapolis. The archaeometric characterization of the calcite alabasters extracted close to Hierapolis and at Gölemezli, thanks to stable carbon and oxygen isotopes analyses of 55 samples, allowed for the discrimination among them and between these stones and the other calcite alabasters exploited and exported in antiquity from south-western Anatolia, North Africa (Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria) and Italy [40,43]. In particular, it has been demonstrated that the identification of the Hierapolis and Gölemezli alabasters may be remarkably favoured by the fact that it was quarried away from geological deposits, i.e., the banded travertine of fissure-ridges, typical of the specific area, whose genesis process conferred the alabaster a particular stable carbon and oxygen isotope signature.…”

“…The archaeometric characterization of the calcite alabasters extracted close to Hierapolis and at Gölemezli, thanks to stable carbon and oxygen isotopes analyses of 55 samples, allowed for the discrimination among them and between these stones and the other calcite alabasters exploited and exported in antiquity from south-western Anatolia, North Africa (Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria) and Italy [40,43]. In particular, it has been demonstrated that the identification of the Hierapolis and Gölemezli alabasters may be remarkably favoured by the fact that it was quarried away from geological deposits, i.e.…”

“…Hierapolis, Gölemezli and Tripolis alabaster quarries: presence of calcite/aragonite in the mineralogical composition from XRD analysis. Data from [22] (Table 3), [41] (p. 454), [43] (Table 3), [46] (p. 16, Figure 6), [47] Recently, archaeometric data from the Tripolis quarries have been also available [46]. Even these data can be integrated with C-O isotopic data regarding the banded travertine of the same area [42,44], thus enriching the dataset on the alabaster quarries of the Lykos valley (Table A2 in Appendix A; Figure 12).…”

“…These data were integrated with carbon and oxygen stable isotope compositions of samples of calcite alabaster from the ancient quarries of the same area, already available in the geological literature [22,41,42], where it is called banded travertine. Moreover, 15 samples were collected from archaeological materials in alabaster discovered in the urban area of Hierapolis with the aim of testing the possibility of archaeometrically determining the provenance of the stone through XRD and isotopic analyses [43]. These data have been integrated by the recent publication of the geological and archaeometric data about the alabaster quarries close to Tripolis [44][45][46] and the village of Gölemezli [47] (it is uncertain if the last site belonged to the territory of Tripolis itself or Hierapolis.…”