Provenance studies of obsidian artefacts from Armenian archaeological sites using the fission-track dating method

Abstract Obsidian was widely used by our ancestors for tool making. In the Trans-Caucasian region, obsidian-bearing volcanic deposits are distributed over wide areas. Forty three obsidian occurrences were analysed using the fission-track (FT) dating method to better constrain the history of Plio-Pleistocene volcanism of this region. The determined formation ages cluster into restricted groups: 0.042–0.120, 0.25–0.40, 0.43–0.56, 1.17–1.38, 1.53, 2.34–2.63 and 4.26–4.56 Ma. The FT data-set on geological samples was used for provenance studies of 112 artefacts from Armenian prehistoric sites or of pebbles from river banks. All artefacts originated from Armenian sources or from sources located in adjacent regions of Turkey and Georgia.