Contextualizing Bronze Age Obsidian Use at the ‘Ritual Spring’ of Mitza Pidighi (Sardinia)

Abstract

This study focuses on obsidian consumption at the 'ritual spring' of Mitza Pidighi in west-central Sardinia, Italy. The site dates to the late Nuragic I to Nuragic III phases of the Bronze Age (ca. 1350-850 B.C.) and is found just east of a contemporaneous residential village, Nuraghe Pidighi. While recent years have seen a surge of archaeological literature on the subject of obsidian use at residential sites throughout the island, there has been little consideration of its role in other archaeological contexts, a research bias that this presentation aims in part to redress. For this study, 142 obsidian artifacts from Mitza Pidighi were analyzed non-destructively using a Thermo Scientific ARL Quant'X EDXRF spectrometer to determine their geological origins. In addition, each artifact was analyzed technotypologically to allow for the reconstruction of the entire chain of events leading up to an artifact's discard. The sourcing results show that obsidians from all four Sardinian subsources are represented at the site, although most come from just one outcrop; the typological analysis indicates that people were physically knapping obsidian near the well to create expedient flake tools and non-prismatic bladelets. In combination, these results have important implications for interpreting the social, economic, and symbolic function of Mitza Pidighi and in understanding the role of obsidian outside of domestic contexts.

Obsidian Studies in the Prehistoric Central Mediterranean: After 50 Years, What Have We Learned and What Still Needs to Be Done?

“…In the past 25 years, the methods used in the central Mediterranean include atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS), laser ablation ICP mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), proton induced X-ray emission (PIXE), scanning electron microscopy with an energy dispersive spectrometer (SEM-EDX), the electron microprobe with wave-length dispersive spectrometers (EPMA-WDX), and different varieties of X-ray fluorescence (XRF) energy and wavelength dispersive spectrometers, including lab-based, portable, and hand-held varieties (Crisci et al 1994, De Francesco et al 2008a, De Francesco et al 2011, De Francesco et al 2012, Freund 2014b, Freund 2016, Le Bourdonnec 2007, Le Bourdonnec et al 2015, Pappalardo et al 2013, Tykot 1997, Tykot 2002, Tykot 2004a, Tykot 2016.…”

“…Crisci et al 1994), and later at the Università di Catania (e.g. La Rosa et al 2006) and McMaster University (Freund 2014b, Freund 2016) has multiplied by many times the numbers of artifacts tested in the central Mediterranean. Other minimally-destructive methods have also been shown successful (SEM-EDS, PIXE, LA-ICP-MS) and many analyses conducted in particular at the CNRS-Université Bordeaux 3 (e.g.…”

Intra-Source Provenance Study on Monte Arci (Sardinia) Obsidian by pXRF: Role of the Data Acquisition and Analysis Tools

“…To date, among the different Monte Arci outcrops [47] four geo-chemical groups are considered to be relevant for provenance studies [48], namely: SA, SB1, SB2, and SC. From the '60s until today, the elemental analyses on Monte Arci obsidian have been based principally on Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) [49][50][51][52][53][54], Particle Induced X-Ray Emission (PIXE) [48,[55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63], microanalysis by scanning electron microscopy (SEM-EDS) [20,25,[64][65][66][67], and X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) [40,47,[68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87]. Other studies were based on infrared [88] and Raman spectroscopy…”

“…Among the XRF-based studies (Table S1), some aimed in distinguishing among the Western Mediterranean obsidian sources [40,47,68,71,[73][74][75]78,79], or focused on Monte Arci sub-sources discrimination [40,47,69,70,[72][73][74][76][77][78][81][82][83][84][85][86][87]. The number of geological samples analysed by XRF was lower or equal to 25 in some studies [68,71,73,79,81] and between 35 and 60 in the other references [47,70,72,74,77,78].…”

“…Among the XRF-based studies (Table S1), some aimed in distinguishing among the Western Mediterranean obsidian sources [40,47,68,71,[73][74][75]78,79], or focused on Monte Arci sub-sources discrimination [40,47,69,70,[72][73][74][76][77][78][81][82][83][84][85][86][87]. The number of geological samples analysed by XRF was lower or equal to 25 in some studies [68,71,73,79,81] and between 35 and 60 in the other references [47,70,72,74,77,78]. Most of the analytical methods are based on the use of absolute concentrations [40,68,[70][71][72][75][76][77][78], obtained based on the calibration of the intensities through the analysis of reference materials, i.e.…”