The question of sources of metal supply and the resulting trade circuits are at the heart of archaeological issues. Provenance studies using lead isotopy has been used since the 1980s to identify the ore deposits from which the metal composing an archaeological object is derived. Indeed, metallurgical processes do not affect the isotopic signature of lead, which remains unchanged between ore and finished product. However, such studies require mineral signature repositories. Archaeologists have therefore built up databases, rich in thousands of analyses. However, these databases only very rarely include gitological information. In addition, lead isotopes are also used in geology but in order to characterize the metallogenic phenomena that lead to the creation of ore deposits. This different type of study requires different sampling: unlike archaeological databases, which include many analyses by mine, geological repositories have very few measurements by deposit. However, although containing few analyses per mine, geological data allow reflection in terms of restricted mineralized subsets and observation of marked groupings in binary diagrams as well as in multidimensional projection. The integration of gitological contexts as qualitative data could thus avoid the problems of statistical discrimination that are common in studies of the provenance of archaeological artifacts. The databases created by geologists, which also count thousands of mineral analyses, can thus be perfectly integrated into production source tracing studies. The finesse of the statistical breakdowns provided by gitological data also opens up new possibilities for data processing through the use of multivariate statistics. Geographical uncertainties are then a function of the quality of the available gitological metadata. Lead isotopic analyses carried out as part of geological studies have much to contribute to the tracing of archaeological production sources.
Investigation of Fe isotope systematics for the complete sequence of natural and metallurgical processes of Ni lateritic ores: Implications for environmental source tracing
