An EPR study of the marbles from quarries of the Denizli region (Turkey): A contribution to the provenance assessment of materials with close relationships

The analytical and spectroscopic discrimination of marbles coming from quarries used in historical times is a task object of a wide interest in archaeometric investigations. This task is even more difficult, when the goal of the provenance assessment is focused on marbles coming from historical quarries located in a close geographic area. In this paper, we present the results of a systematic Electron Paramagnetic Resonance spectroscopy study aimed at assessing the discrimination criteria among 5 quarries located in the Denizli region (Anatolia, Turkey) that were benefited in Hellenistic and Roman period to provide materials for the buildings in the nearby city of Hierapolis of Phrygia (Turkey). The resulting EPR characterisation is used, in combination with the results of isotope geochemistry and petrological observation, to define criteria able to discriminate the provenance of marble samples from the considered quarries. The criteria arose from the analysis operated through robust compositional statistical techniques over the results of the experimental investigation. In this approach, the internal structure of the multimethodic dataset was unravelled. The results here presented provide evidence of a good discriminating ability of the proposed approach.