Characterisation of the white marble of two unpublished ancient Roman quarries on the Islands of Fourni and Skyros (Greece).

Abstract

Most outcrops of good quality crystalline marble of the Mediterranean countries were exploited in Roman times for the production of blocks to be used for statuary and architectural elements. Hence, a wide variety of marble was employed and is now found in archaeological excavations. The precise determination of the provenance of a marble object is of great archaeological importance, and is obtained in most cases by the petrographic study of a thin section with analysis of the C and 0 stable isotopes. Despite of the fact that it is highly developed, the already existing petrographic and isotopic data base of the most important marbles used in antiquity is still insufficient because of the incomplete knowledge and study of all ancient quarries. The contribution of this research is to add new data on two unpublished small Roman quarries discovered on the Greek islands of Fourni and Skyros. The marbles quarried there are very pure and characterised by a low-grade metamorphism which produced a limited ve.it -3.9. The Skyros marble vary from o13 CPDB = 0.6 to 1.9, and o180PDB = -4.2 to -7.1. These data have been compared with those of similar marbles used in antiquity.

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