 Okay, I think we all know where Cicely is, and perhaps also Leapery, which is just north, and just to move along here, I'm going to give a brief history about Mediterranean obsidian studies, focusing then specifically on Leapery, which if you didn't already know actually has multiple geological sources, talk about the application of this to many archaeological samples, and in a couple of minutes perhaps talk about how to integrate this information with what we otherwise have. Obsidian has been found literally at a thousand archaeological sites in the central Mediterranean, and as you probably also know, there are multiple obsidian sources, so it's a very basic question whether they're coming from Leapery, Palmarola, Cantilleria, or from Sardinia. Some of this of course has to do with the simple location, how far over water the transport involved in such things. I'm going to focus specifically on obsidian here, but we have to consider that this is part of the Neolithic package. Prior to the Neolithic obsidian was not used in the western Mediterranean, and as soon as we had the agriculture, pottery, and other kinds of things, the obsidian use began and very quickly was spread over great territories. The study of obsidian and identifying where it came from started with work by Colin Renfrew and colleagues, and by the 1970s had come up with a general kind of distribution pattern with the obsidian from Leapery, dominating what you would find in the southern half of Italy, Sicily, and elsewhere, but this was based on really very small numbers of artifacts and also limited contexts from which that small number came. Starting in the 1980, sorry, not in 1980, 2000, when was it? I forget now. 2000 did a detailed study of the geology of Leapery. Anybody who goes there today, you can walk on the beach and find plenty of obsidian, but a lot of this comes from more recent volcanic activity just about 1300 years ago, and obviously those were not available in prehistoric times. Collecting lots of material from different localities, conducting different kinds of analyses on there to go and distinguish them. Today I do this with a portable, non-destructive machine, which is great for dealing with artifacts in many museums around Italy, Malta, and elsewhere, and I'm not going to get into the details on this here, but just to show you that we can go and easily distinguish between Leapery, Palmerola, Pantilleria, Milos and the Aegean, Carpathian sources, and so on. Just on Leapery itself, we can distinguish between Monteguardia, which fortunately or unfortunately does not have large enough pieces of obsidian to make stone tools, so we can ignore that subsource by itself, but there's clearly a distinction between Caneto D'Entro and Gabalotto Gorge and even two different parts of Gabalotto Gorge. Is this significant when we go and interpret archaeological samples? We will see. Here we're focused in and you can see on the southern end where Caneto D'Entro is a relatively small outcrop that has the obsidian, whereas on the northern part Gabalotto Gorge, there's quite a lot of the obsidian relatively available, but a lot of this has also been disturbed and covered over by the more recent volcanic activity. So the actual locations where ancient people were collecting the material is still a big question. With the help of colleagues and the permission from many Sovereign Tendenzas and so on, we have gone and looked at many, many artifacts and not just taking random pieces, but recording what type of lithics, what technology, are we looking at arrowheads, blades, scrapers, et cetera, et cetera, debitage and so on. And at this point have done this literally on more than 10,000 artifacts in Sicily and elsewhere in the central Mediterranean and just focusing starting off in the Sicily area. I think you know where Malta is to the south. We've already heard about Malta. I'm going to compare this with the island of Ustica. Many of you may not know that, but it's roughly the same distance from Sicily but north of Palermo rather than on the southern side like Malta is. Based on the overall analyses that have been done, we can identify obsidian coming from lipery more or less throughout Italy into southern France, Croatia, and some even in North Africa as well. But the quantity and the specific time periods involved is really important as well as what other sources of obsidian are competing with the lipery obsidian in some of these locations. For Sicily, about 50 different sites have analyzed a significant number of artifacts in the eastern part of Sicily, western part of Sicily, and so on. I'm going to not show you, talk about detailed numbers and things here, but in addition to determining the sources, looking at whether these are cores which would indicate the pre-preparation closer to the source and the transport of those cores then for the preparation of artifacts on a local basis as well as whether there has been debitage or other waste being found at any of these sites. That depends largely on whether these are surface deposits, whether they have been excavated, and also on the quality of the excavation when that was done and so on. As far as non-lipery obsidian, in Sicily, mostly in the western part, but some other examples, we're competing with the obsidian from Pantilleria. Some of this has to do simply with the distance between the site and these different sources, but there's also differences in color and physical properties between Pantilleria and lipery obsidian and other reasons that the access would have affected things. Pantilleria does not seem to have been occupied, that is no sites have been identified there prior to the early Copper Age, but we definitely have the use of Pantilleria obsidian starting in the early Neolithic. Just to zoom in here and look at the different colors which represent different percentages of Pantilleria obsidian, you can see that yes on the island of Pantilleria, at all of the sites there, it's 100% and the site of Zembra, north of Tunisia as well, but it's significant in the sense of between 30 and 80% at a number of sites like Pacheco Grotto, Majorana, on the west side of Sicily, and surprisingly enough at the inland site of Castellicchio, whereas most of the coastal sites in between Pantilleria and western Sicily have much less of the Pantillerian obsidian in that greenish kind of color. There's many sites on the eastern side of Sicily that have no Pantilleria obsidian at all. I'm going to talk about Ustica up there in the north, which has a fair amount of obsidian coming from Pantilleria as well. Here's Ustica. This is a small little island, just several square kilometers, and has no freshwater source at least today, but nevertheless more than six different archeological sites have been identified on that tiny island going back to the early Neolithic. I've gone there and analyzed all of these artifacts, which by the way are quite plentiful in number, so there was clearly regular transport to this remote small little island. In any case, overall, it's dominated by leapery obsidian, small amount relatively coming from Pantilleria. This is different from the nearest archeological site in mainland Sicily near Palermo at the Grotto del Uzzo. I argue that this has something to do with the transport of the leapery obsidian going more likely, more or less due west, from leapery to Ustica and not traveling to the north coast of Sicily along the coast and up there, because if that were the case, you would expect to have similar percentages at Grotto del Uzzo and others there. This says something along with the other obsidian studies that I have done about the frequency, regularity and so on of open water transport starting in the early Neolithic time period. Let's go down to Malta and Gozo again and looking at two different sites, in particular Scorba on Malta and the Brocktorff Circle on Gozo, and they have totally different percentages or usage of the obsidian from leapery and Pantilleria. There are also differences in the context, that is the Brocktorff Circle is a burial complex, whereas Scorba is more of a residential and ritual location. I'm not going to explain all the pictures and stuff here, you've seen that stuff before, but what we have on Scorba on the mainland is it's mostly coming from leapery, which is in some ways no surprise, but at Brocktorff it's the total other direction, most of it, vast majority of it, is coming from Pantilleria. How can this be so different between two islands that are just several kilometers apart from each other? This tells us something about the specific selection of obsidian based on a variety of geological, physical principles, but perhaps other things as well, the color meaning something that would be very difficult to explain. Heading to some other places in the limited time that I have here, getting out of Sicily into the southern half of Italy, the vast majority again is still coming from leapery, but you're also getting small amounts coming from other sources, Palmerola and even from Sardinia, making its way, there's one piece of Sardinian obsidian found in Sicily and several pieces found in Calabria and elsewhere, but focusing more on the leapery obsidian here at the site of Poggiola Vastro, a Middle Neolithic site in central Italy. Leapery obsidian is one third of what's being found there and a whole lot of it coming from Palmerola, which is fairly close there as well. We head even further north, the site of Pescale and find that the leapery obsidian is even less. We're getting further away, so that's a basic logical kind of thing and mostly coming from Sardinia, but even a little bit north of that, four sites all around Palma have very similar percentages at each of those four and they are all dominated by the leapery obsidian again. We're talking here about inland sites and so how we go and interpret this is really the big question here. Leapery, of course, is an island, so there had to have been some transport from there to the coast of Italy at some point and then overland, probably not by the people who were in charge of the boat, bringing it inland to different places and how we can go and explain the vast difference between Pescale and these Palma sites. Some of this may have to do with slight differences in the time period that is represented here. In particular, it seems that the leapery obsidian tends to be more dominant in the earlier Neolithic period whereas the Sardinian obsidian kind of takes over in the middle and late Neolithic time period at these kinds of distances. In southern France also in the middle Neolithic Sardinian obsidian dominates what has been found there at a number of different archaeological sites. One of the differences though in southern France is most of the Sardinian obsidian comes from one particular outcrop and that is different than what we find in the northern part of Italy. From doing all of these analyses, we can go and draw these straight lines to those thousands of archaeological sites and say this is where the obsidian is coming from. Of course the straight lines is not how it got there and this doesn't say anything here. This is putting together the different time periods and quantities and so on. But leapery obsidian clearly spread the greatest distances of all of the obsidians in central Mediterranean and also in quantity as well. What are the variables that are involved here? Transport over land as well as the sea. How frequently this transport was going on? Would you be riding in Neolithic kinds of boats in the winter time? These kinds of issues? What kind of socioeconomic status do we have in the early Neolithic compared to the later Neolithic? I think we're talking about some kinds of complexity here and control over the actual original geological sources where the production of cores and then the transport of the cores further away was likely going on. What was the obsidian actually being used for? In Sicily and nearby places where the obsidian was 90% or more of the totalithic assemblage it was being used on everything. But farther and farther away a lot of other stone material was being used as well. You get very far away where the leapery obsidian or any kind of obsidian is a small percentage it's more likely to be used for very special kinds of uses. Lots of questions still remain on this but thank you very much.