THE LITHOTHEQUE ROLE IN THE LITHIC RAW MATERIALS STUDIES. THE CASE OF THE ITALIAN SILIBA

Chert artifacts represent one of the most durable product manufactured by the humans and their recovery and characterisation allow to assess new data on the technological and cultural features of prehistory civilizations. The geographic identification of procurement area of lithic raw materials is essential in the reconstruction of the social and economic behaviours of the communities. In this view, a significant role is played by the lithotheques since they include lithic samples coming from variable spread geographic area and constitute a valuable comparison tool for provenance studies of archaeological finds. An Italian example of lithic collection is SiLiBA, the lithotheque of the Earth and Geoenvironmental Sciences Department of the University of Bari Aldo Moro. It consists of about 1500 samples of geological cherts collected from outcrops, sites and mines mainly in the Apulia (Southern Italy) region and across southern Italy (Basilicata, Sicily), Croatia, Serbia, Switzerland and Iraqi Kurdistan, belonging to formations from the Cretaceous to the Quaternary Period. The strength of the collection is its database, reporting the petrographic, colourimetric, geochemical and micropaleontological features, obtained by a dedicated non-invasive investigation protocol (NM-PCI). Such results represent a fingerprint for each samples and make the SiLiBA lithotheque an essential reference point in the identification of provenance of lithic raw materials transformed by the prehistory local humans for the producing of chert objects.The SiLiBA database is constantly evolving and new lithic samples are collected and investigated and original data are produced and recorded in the database. This last consists of report sheets containing, together with the results of the NM-PCI investigation, other several information such as photographs, geographic coordinates, geological outcrop description. A website dedicated to the presentation of the lithotheque will soon be online, even if the complete database is already available for consultation by the scientists and archaeologists on request.