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Aegean Marble: Science and Common Sense

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

B. Ashmole
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Extract

In an article on the difficulty of identifying marbles from the Aegean area Mr. Colin Renfrew and Dr. J. Springer Peacey rightly criticize the careless use by later scholars of the results obtained in 1890 by G. R. Lepsius, who, by cutting thin sections of various marbles and examining them under transmitted light, claimed to be able to identify Pentelic, Hymettan, Parian, Naxian, and, less specifically, ‘Island’ marbles.

It seems, however, that even when applied with care the method is useless, and Renfrew and Peacey will have none of it. ‘The use’, they say, ‘of the terms “Pentelic”, “Hymettan”, “Parian”, “Naxian”, and so forth, applied to ancient sculptures on the basis of simple visual inspection or of microscopic examination of thin specimens, is not justified…. No single characteristic or combination of characteristics is sufficient to identify with certainty the source of a single given specimen…. No reliance can be placed on Lepsius' marble identifications, and even less [sic] on those authors who have ascribed marble to supposed sources on the basis of colour and grainsize…. Those who make them or follow them are perpetuating a myth which is just eighty years old…’

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 65 , November 1970 , pp. 1 - 2
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1970

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References

1 BSA lxiii (1968) 45–66.

2 Renfrew and Peacey use the analogy from wine, and assume that Spanish champagne and Californian Beaujolais can be distinguished from their prototypes; another Cambridge archaeologist goes further and claims to be able, without scientific aid, to tell the difference, not only between Bordeaux and Burgundy, but between smaller districts, and even between different years of vintage. There is no reason to doubt most of his claims; yet it is highly unlikely that science will ever devise a method of making these distinctions with certainty. Meanwhile the old methods of using taste and smell will continue.

3 Specimens from old collections, of which the exact source is often uncertain, should not be used.

4 For example, Renfrew suggests that the colossus of the Naxians on Delos may not be of Naxian marble because there are quarries on Mykonos and on Delos itself: the crucial question is whether there are or have been quarries on those islands capable of producing blocks of this size and sculptural quality, and whether they yield marble similar to that of the colossus.

5 The comparison of thin sections by photographing them in transmitted and in polarized light has (pace Peacey) a certain diagnostic value. There is also the spectrographic analysis used by Young, W. J. in Boston Bulletin lxvi (1968) 141–5Google Scholar, the efficacy of which needs further testing by use on a greater range of specimens.