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Parthenon Marble Quarry Identified
Politicians may not be able to resolve the dispute between Great Britain and Greece over where the marble sculptures taken nearly 200 years ago by Lord Elgin belong, but scientists have refined techniques that may pinpoint the exact quarry from which they originated.
Scott Pike, a geologist at Emory University, has conducted the first systematic study of the Pentelic quarries located outside Athens. By studying the chemical makeup of the marble in the quarries and those of the Parthenon, he has been able to pinpoint, with a high degree of confidence, the exact quarries from which the marble originated. (See sidebar.)
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This sculpture is located in the British Museum of London. Originally, there were 92 metopes - individual sculptures in high relief - on the Parthenon. Of 64 that survived, 15 are in the museum and 18 remain in Athens. In some cases, parts of the same sculpture are divided between Athens and London.
Photograph by B. Aut
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"Archaeologists, art historians, and museum curators can use quarry information to date artifacts, establish provenance, piece together ancient trade routes, and identify modern forgeries," said Pike.
STUDYING STONE The study of marble to determine the sources for ancient sculptors has been going on for more than a century. "Many sculptures don't come from archaeological excavations. They're in museums and collections, and we don't really know where they were dug up," says Robert Tykot, an archeological scientist at the University of South Florida. "Stable isotope analysis of the marble can help determine whether a piece is an original Greek sculpture, a Roman copy, or a modern forgery." "A lot of sculptures have been broken. Pieces - noses, arms, heads - have fallen off and been put back on. Knowing the isotopic composition can tell us whether the pieces all came from one block of marble or whether it has been reconstructed to maybe make it more valuable on the marketplace." Archaeologists can also track trade routes by following the path of artifacts. A vase found in Rome carved from marble quarried in Asia Minor in the 5th century BC, for instance, can contribute to information archaeologists are piecing together about trade routes, political alliances, empire expansion, and artistic styles of a particular time period or culture. PENTELIC QUARRIES Pike was able to identify 172 specific quarry pits, modern and ancient, in the Pentelic marble quarry region, the largest and most significant source of ancient white marble in the eastern Mediterranean. He extracted samples and compiled an extensively detailed topographic and geologic map of the quarry region. Since the 1970s, scientists have been measuring the stable isotopes of carbon and oxygen to distinguish between marble varieties. The assumption has always been that all the marble in a particular region was created as a result of the same geologic history and will have the same chemical signature, says Pike. His research shows that there is considerable variety between different pits in the same quarry. "Our ability to discriminate between quarries within the same quarry field expands the scope of marble provenance studies and allows for more specific archaeological questions to be addressed," he says. Pike reported his findings November 15 at the 112th annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Reno, Nevada.
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