Geochemical provenance studies of basalt vessel preforms from the Iron Age workshop at Tel Hazor, Israel, and potential geological sources

Abstract

The discovery of an Iron Age basalt vessel workshop at Tel Hazor revealed numerous discarded preforms in different production stages. Provenance analyses allow us to reconstruct the vessels' journey from the mining of raw material off site to production in the workshop. To determine the extraction sites, the geochemical compositions of the artifacts were compared to an extensive set of geochemical data on basaltic rocks in Israel. Combined with petrographic features and insights from field surveys on the relevant locations, the results show that the raw material was extracted most probably from two different locations, each several kilometres distant from Tel Hazor.