Provenance of the Jerf el Ahmar (Middle Euphrates Valley, Syria) obsidians

Sourcing obsidian from Tell Aswad and Qdeir 1 (Syria) by SEM-EDS and EDXRF: Methodological implications

“…Discriminating these sources has long been a challenge in Near East obsidian studies (though see Chataigner, 1994), with many characterization studies attributing an artefact's raw material to a "Bingöl A/Nemrut Dag" compositional group (e.g. Abbès et al, 2003). However, it has already been demonstrated that it is possible to distinguish them through various means.…”

“…• the bureaucracy involved in exporting archaeological objects for analysis; • the fact that so many of the early characterization techniques were partly, or wholly destructive, such as optical emission spectroscopy (Renfrew et al, 1966), neutron activation analysis (Aspinall et al, 1972;Yellin, 1995) and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectroscopy (Abbès et al, 2003).…”

“…We do not imply that this is the first use of these techniques in a Near Eastern context, as XRF was employed to characterize obsidian from the Late Chalcolithic (5th-4th millennium BC) Syrian sites of Tell Brak and Tell Hamoukar (Khalidi et al, 2009), while SEM-EDS was used to source artefacts from the PPNA -early PPNB Syrian site of Jerf el Ahmar (Abbès et al, 2003) (Fig. 1).…”

The use of SEM-EDS, PIXE and EDXRF for obsidian provenance studies in the Near East: a case study from Neolithic Çatalhöyük (central Anatolia)

“…The ICP-MS analyses were made at Brest University following the Tm-spiking procedure used by the CNRS group for over 10 years, a protocol that insures the internal consistency of all data obtained so far on Anatolian obsidians (Bellot-Gurlet, 1998;Abbès et al, 2003;BellotGurlet et al, 2003;Bressy et al, 2005;Carter et al, 2006).…”

“…q This article is dedicated to the late Joseph Salomon, a former leading member of Recent work at CRP2A (Bordeaux) has involved the investigation of two non-destructive analytical techniques that have received little, or no previous application in Near Eastern obsidian sourcing studies, namely scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) (Keller and Seifried, 1990;Delerue, 2007;Delerue and Poupeau, 2007) and particle induced x-ray emission (PIXE) (Abbès et al, 2003;Le Bourdonnec et al, 2005;Delerue, 2007;Carter et al, 2008). This paper focuses initially on the ability of these two methods to chemically discriminate some of the major Anatolian obsidian sources and to report new sourcing data using these approaches on 100 obsidian artifacts from Aceramic e Early Pottery Neolithic Çatalhöyük.…”