Conveners:
Fabrizio Antonelli (Università Iuav di Venezia)
Emma Cantisani (CNR-ispc)
Celestino Grifa (Università degli Studi del Sannio)
Claudio Mazzoli (Università di Padova)
Mineralogy, petrography and geochemistry are pillar disciplines of the archaeometric and archaeological sciences that deal with the study of natural and artificial geomaterials – such as stones, marbles, ceramics, glasses, mortars, plasters/frescoes, pigments and metals – used for different typologies of artifacts and architectural elements. Their contribution is of fundamental importance, on one hand, for the definition of the sourcing-manufacture-use process, i.e. the supply chain, inferring the capacity of raw material procurement strategies and technological development of the ancient populations; on the other hand, for understand the decay-related problems of all these materials. To this end, a multitude of analytical laboratory techniques have served these disciplines for decades, providing a large number of datasets. This session is open to contributions focused on both the provenance studies of archaeological materials - from terrestrial, underwater and museum contexts - and the validation of technological skills attained by ancient craftsmen. New approaches to dataset management, elaboration and interpretation by new geostatistical and AI-supported tools to solve provenance/technology and conservative problems are particularly welcome.