 All right, well thank you, all right. So let's just get right into it here. I'll begin with an outline of what I'm going to talk about. So I'll begin with some background information about exotica and come up with a definition and connect the concept of exotica to valuation and social value and help me recognize value in the archeological record. I'll talk about city and sourcing studies and use a case study from the Neolithic Central Mediterranean to explore the idea of exotica. So I've selected a couple of sites here where the criteria might be met. Orscas on France, Iberia, and Apulia in Italy. And then hopefully we'll end off a discussion about the idea of obsidianized exotica and hopefully end up with some conclusions from all of that. So we'll start with the definition here. I'll take a definition from TICOP 2011. Exotica, something non-native or foreign which has been imported and appreciated by the receiving culture. So we have a couple of parts here, right? It's imported, being part of the definition and appreciated as well. We'll kind of explore what that means. I'll take some work from Jiro of 1989, defining value and what makes artifacts valuable. Rarity is one tenet. Something that's rare, tenets mean more valuable. Artifact size, things that are larger than usual tend to be valued. Artifact longevity, so something that is in circulation for long periods of time, has more opportunity for value to be embedded within. And the last two are all about how difficult something is to produce. So something more difficult to produce is valued more because people appreciate its craftsmanship. Obsidian, a volcanic glass, an envious rock that's found throughout the world. It's an ideal raw material for stone tool creation. But of course it also serves other ritual and symbolic functions as well. Due to the distinct physical properties, obsidian can be sourced to the geological outcrops in which they originate, obsidian sourcing. And from there, a number of questions can be addressed. A whole range of questions. Obsidian sourcing studies are found worldwide. There's a brief list of some from the past decade or so. Well over 100 from every context around the world. So some of the issues that are addressed through obsidian sourcing. Questions about procurement, identity, social identity, movement of people, colonization events and so forth. And lastly, cultural contact. This is where this concept of exoticate comes in. Cultural contact, interaction between different groups of people. Particularly in situations where there's exchange going on. And that's really where exotica fits in. It's about social interaction and contact. So some studies around the world where they come from. Lots of studies in Oceania exploring the concept of exotica as a proxy for interaction. In the central Mediterranean, when we talk about obsidian as exotica, it's usually exploring things at the tail end of exchange networks. So at the very ends of the distribution of various obsidian sources. So lots of obsidian sources in the Mediterranean, in the Carpathian, a little farther north, sources in the Aegean, central Turkey. There is evidence of a couple of sites in northern Italy where a Carpathian source material makes their way over there. One possible piece of million obsidian in northern Italy, a site of Bruno de Leone. But in general, most of the obsidian that we find in the central Mediterranean comes from these four West Mediterranean sources. So we have Montearchi, Sardinia, Calderola, Leapery, and Pantilleria. They're the four sources that were utilized in central Mediterranean prehistory. The beginnings of obsidian use corresponds with the spread of agriculture. And Neolithic societies from the Near East, around the 620 of BC. We'd be first to see obsidian use and long distance exchange coming about. Here's a diagram here of Neolithic sites where obsidian has been reported. More than 500 sites here found throughout Sardinia, Corsica, throughout Italy, France, North Africa, Sicily, all over the place. Likely being exchanged for models of down the line exchange redistribution along the maritime and coastal routes. When I'm talking about Neolithic society here, I'm talking about small scale farming societies, very little evidence of formal social hierarchies. And importantly here, obsidian is typically found in residential contexts. It's most often found in the villager context themselves. Some artistic renderings. When obsidian is used, it's used to create flake-based tools, an artifact form in Sardinia, Corsica. Pressure flake blades are also very common, being found throughout mainland Italy, southern France, all over the place. These are the two most common artifact forms. So it's just a background to study the context or everything. So let's explore a couple of examples. This figure here shows the distribution of leapery obsidian. So leapery is the source here. You can see it has a very large distribution, the largest of any of the four sources, being found thousands of kilometers away from the source itself. And one of the sites that's kind of at the tail end, I guess, of this network is the site of Atencibi Gona. There are only two sites where obsidian from leapery has been reported on Corsica. And of course, this site is the farthest away. And again, it's this concept of the tail end of these networks are most likely to find Exotica. So we're quite on the board of that at all, studying obsidian from this site. It's a piece of the final helific. And this is what was found here. A block of leapery obsidian, very poor napping quality, running roughly two and a half kilograms. Most of the obsidian we find of leapery origin is of final products of pressure flake blades. Finding any kind of primary material outside of leapery is highly useful, particularly of this size. In this context, rates and its importance may have been unrelated to stone tool production. This is not gonna be an ideal raw material for producing pressure flake blades of the style that's being produced. So questions emerge from that. Why and how did it get there? And who was the one, I guess, appreciating it? The authors argue that provides evidence to the occasional contact between members of different socioeconomic systems. And this is a theme that we're gonna see here is that when Exotica is in vote, it's all about cultural contact between different groups of people. Here's the Pantilleria Distribution, the island of Pantilleria here. Has a pretty limited distribution to Sicily and North Africa, a couple of examinal anomalies. And particularly, one anomaly is the site of San Sebastian in southern France, a real outlier where you're gonna find Pantilleria obsidian. It's not neolithic, but I had to include it. It's a copper-raised burial site, ordered by William Sturpinall in 1984, two arrowheads of Pantilleria obsidian, whose greenish hue may have been a factor in its appeal. Pantilleria is unique in that it's porcelain and green as a greenish hue to it. Highly unusual to find arrowheads as well, very unusual to find arrowheads anywhere in mainland Italy or mainland France as well. The authors argue that one of the questions raised by this work is that of the routes by which obsidian reached southern France from the island sources. Montaerci, a Sardinian sources, I'll focus on two here at the tail ends. We have the site of Puglidia Moffetta and a number of sites in Iberia, actually very near where we are right now. And very different things going on in these two contexts. In Iberia, this is work by Tiratus et al. 2014, we did the study of these materials and collated them. We have middle-nuclear burial sites at La Saretta, Bobilla Maderelle, Bobilla Padro, and the verisite mine of Gava. In total, there are five pressure flake blades and a pressure flake core, all from the SA subsource of Montaerci. So on Montaerci, there are multiple subsources, all from one singular one, which is in keeping with the pattern in southern France. SA materials are distinguished by their transparency compared with any other source. And I would argue that the presence of finely crafted pressure flake blades in multiple burials within a restricted territory suggests a shared cultural understanding of their value. The presence of an associated core even may suggest that the production of these objects was part of a funerary ritual, performance similar to what was occurring in early Cycladic Greece, a term that's been called necrolithic, where we have funerary ritual directly connected to the production of pressure flake blades and maybe what is occurring here in Iberia. A very different story comes from cool demolveta in southeastern Italy, where we have middle and late Neolithic site worked by Alfred Fredin and Tony. What was found here is a single platelet, weighing 0.5 grams, and attributed to the SC subsource of Montaerci. Black Sardinian obsidian is not always visually distinguishable from leapery raw materials, which are very common in this area. So I would argue that objects like this may not even recognize as something exotic. There's nothing about their visual properties makes that readily apparent, and there's really nothing exceptional about this artifact itself. The authors argue though, that it highlights trans-Apanine exchange network to the Mediterranean and Adriatic coasts. So what can we get from all of this here? Obviously some patterns here and how the literature discusses obsidian as exotica, they mostly focus around its role as a marker of social interaction, and as a means of reconstructing exchange networks. Interesting questions nevertheless emerge when focus is placed on how value was constructed in the prehistoric past, and on how that may have differed through time and space. So I think this is something we can work on a little more. The construction of value can occur at the individual level, based on a person's lived experience. So I think the example, the Corsica example, is an example of this where that big block may have been appreciated that maybe as a token from someone's journeys and travels around, as opposed to something that a village or something rallied around or we're aware of. But of course at a broader level, you can have shared cultural understandings of something value, which I think comes from Iberia where we see the same pattern emerging from multiple sites. Well it may seem that long-distance exchange items would have an inherent social value. Archeologists must appreciate that neolithic groups, due to their sedentary nature, would have a much more localized geographic knowledge, to the point at which an object from 100 kilometers or 1,000 kilometers away might have been equally exotic. It would take a real knowledge of the territory to understand distance in the same way. We're talking about sedentary groups of agro-pastoralists. Some conclusions, sitting in the highly adaptable raw material, it serves important functions that extend beyond just the utilitarian. The concept of exotic is useful in this context because it necessitates an engagement with the questions about why objects were transported to vast distances in the prehistoric past and how they were integrated and reimagined in societies on the outer bounds of long-distance exchange networks. In this discussion, examples that I've discussed come from sites where obsidian's value is connected to its size and eccentricity, such as Corsica and southern France. And from contexts where finely-made artifacts are associated with human internments and possibly performative ritual. However, just because something is rare does not necessarily mean it was appreciated as such. And I think that's something important here when we tie in that definition of exonica itself. Thank you.