Seminar GM & ED Gaïa :

Tracing rock provenance: how to analyse rocks/stones in a non-destructive, portable but quantitative way?

at 14:00 amphi 23.01 campus Triolet – Université de Montpellier

presented by Antoine TRIANTAFYLLOU (Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon )

Participer à la conférence Zoom (ID de réunion : 989 2928 8227)

One of the major challenges in geosciences and more specifically in geoarchaeology is to provide a precise fingerprint of rocks or stones and identify their provenance, linking them to a given source (quarry or an erosional site, etc.). Combining multiple analytical methods and diversifying discriminant proxies is the key to improve the distinction of sourcing regions with a higher spatial resolution. Doing these analyses directly in the field can be very useful or mandatory. It is trivial for geoarchaeology studies for which chemical analyses have to be non-destructive and on site. For geology projects, having a portable lab can guide our sampling strategy and/or give us a more continuous records on geological objects. Anyway, here, I will present some methods and nice results we had, using multiple handheld analytical tools from the FAIRE platform I’m overseeing, including portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (pXRF), portable Magnetic Susceptibilimeter, portable Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (pLIBS), and portable Raman spectrometer. I will illustrate some of their advantages/limitations and few applications via different ongoing research projects in geoarchaeology in Crete, Corsica, Rome.

Antoine Triantafyllou is Assistant Prof. at the Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon since 2020. He did his PhD at the University of Nantes and the University of Mons in Belgium, and several post-docs at the ALC in Arizona, the GTime laboratory at the University of Brussels and the Geopetro lab at the university of Liège.