Siliceous Raw Material Exploitation at Hort de la Boquera Site (Margalef de Monsant, Tarragona, España) : First Results from La-Icp-Ms Analysis

Summary, in English

Research on the sourcing of siliceous raw materials in Prehistory has taken a step forward with the addition of geochemical techniques and elemental analysis to the archaeopetrological method. Counter to the macroscopic techniques, which retain an elevated subjective percentage in their results, geochemical techniques and especially LA-ICP-MS analysis generate objective, quantifiable and usable data, helping us to complete another mineralogical analysis.
95% of the siliceous raw material from the Hort de la Boquera archaeological site (Margalef de Montsant, Tarragona, Spain) is a type of flint from an evaporitic origin that petrografically is characterized by a chalcedonic matrix with gypsum lenticules as inclusions.
Siliceous Raw Material Exploitation at Hort De La Boquera Site 235
Multiple flint outcrops from an evaporitic origin (Eocene-Oligocene) and with many closed characteristics such as the lithic raw material from Hort de la Boquera are located near the site (Cornudella Group-Ulldemolins Complex), making them very suitable to supply the inhabitants of the Hort de la Boquera site.
We have two different but complementary goals in this research: on the one hand, to characterize, describe and create a database for all the different types of flint recovered, emphasizing their geochemical marks. On the other hand, we have the aim to compare these results with those obtained from the raw materials recovered at the site, which would provide a range of complementary data to discover the potential catchment areas and help us to understand certain behaviours of the prehistoric communities from the Hort de la Boquera site.