Raman spectroscopy analysis of Palaeolithic industry from Guadalteba terrace river, Campillos (Guadalteba county, Southern of Iberian Peninsula).

Abstract

A representative set of eight lithic tools suitably selected among the very rich Palaeolithic industry collected over the past years
in different archaeological sites of the Guadalteba County (Mlaga, Spain) has been nondestructively investigated by means of
Raman spectroscopy using both portable and benchtop Raman spectrometers. This article reports on the first archaeometric
Raman analysis of these archaeological samples with the scope of checking if these readily available, nondestructive, fast
and cheap vibrational spectroscopic techniques, which in addition do not require a preliminary sample preparation, could provide
any meaningful information for characterizing the mineral composition of chert artefacts and ultimately some specific
arguments about their assignment to distinctive groups of raw materials of a particular provenance. On the basis of the vibrational
data, it was confirmed that a-quartz was the raw material in all the cases, although a small amount of moganite was also
evidenced as a distinctive fingerprint in these chert samples. On the other hand, crusts were mainly made of calcite in all the
cases, sometimes accompanied by other minerals such as barite or anatase. This first Raman spectroscopic study on chert
and sandstone artefacts from the Guadalteba county reveals that there are good premises for a further and more thorough
archaeometric investigation of these lithic tools based on sets of Raman measurements (Raman mapping) on each specimen
rather than on single-point Raman experiments such as in the present case, given the wide macroscopic heterogeneity of this
kind of samples (colour, grain size, transparency, etc.). The Raman-mapping archaeometric analyses of bulks and crusts would
be also complemented with X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence data.

Resources

• 2012-JRS-guadalteba1.pdf

Bibliography

V. Hérnandez, S. C. F. J. G. S. J. P. M. J. (2012): Raman spectroscopy analysis of Palaeolithic industry from Guadalteba terrace river, Campillos (Guadalteba county, Southern of Iberian Peninsula).. – In: Journal of Raman Spectroscopy, Vol. 43(11), p: 1651-1657, DOI: 10.1002/jrs.4104