A New Database of the Quantitative Cathodoluminescence of the Main Quarry Marbles Used in Antiquity

Abstract

Quantitative cathodoluminescence (CL) has rarely been applied for the archaeometric studies concerning marble provenance, despite its potential. This paper develops the method and provides a new database of the parameters obtained from the main marble quarries used in antiquity. With a total number of 473 marble samples from ten districts of the central and eastern Mediterranean, it is the first database on quantitative CL, with the additional advantage of being the same samples that have already characterized by other conventional techniques and that are available in the literature. Focused on the measurements of the intensity peaks at the UV and visible spectra, registered by a spectrometer coupled to a scanning electron microscope (CL-SEM), the representative values are plotted on different useful diagrams to be applied in the identification of marble provenance studies, as a complementary tool of other analyses.