 So basically we are doing research in two big projects in the Caribbean one is the nexus project Which was the biggest project was also funded the first research and then we are part of a second project The Siba project which is an acronym for stone Interchanges within the bohemian archipelago, but it's funny because this is also Siba is also the term for stone in the classic taíno dialect. So that fits pretty well and this study explores the bohemian archipelagos position within and connections to the wider Caribbean region and This study showcases how museum collections of Lucane materials Many which were asserted in the early 1900s Were not studied for over a century can contribute enormously to expand our understanding of Lucane exchange networks and connections to the wider circumparibian region so over 700 islands make up the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos which is called the Lucane Archipelago and the southern islands Comprising are comprising the Turks and Caicos islands and the Inaquas and those are some 100 miles north of the nearest greater Antilles islands of Hispaniola and Cuba Which are the proposed homelands of the initial set us settlers of this archipelago and Forays into the Turks and Caicos were initiated approximately also Sebastian pointed that out 700 AD with expansions from more than hispaniola primarily to exploit key marine resources and The Bahamas were colonized roughly at the same time by migrants from more central Cuba and also probably hispaniola and The current evidence suggests That the first settlers used these islands as seasonal outposts But it was not until after approximately 1080 that permanent settlements. I think you said something like 880 that permanent settlements were established on the main islands and populations increased and material culture diversified So within this short time frame people migrated from the much larger islands of Cuba and Hispaniola and adapted to the smaller newly colonized settings while they are retaining certain traditions of their homelands as well as maintaining wider links to facilitate access to Desirable which are not available locally as for the jade for example so What you can see here is a really simplified geological map of the greater Caribbean and It is clear that the Bahamas Turks and Caicos islands Are entirely formed out of limestone and limestone is just too soft for making useful tools So therefore all hard rocks like jade Chert and basalt which are necessary for food and plant processing had to be important important And our objective is to determine the source of these exotics This study is also quite unique because it is a synergy and it's a combination Which pitches the arts and the scientist sciences and we are all We are different researchers With specialties in petrology and iconography and geochemistry And we are using state-of-the-art isotope geochemical studies And we are aiming to explore the wider social political and economic connections between the archipelagic Oh and the wider Caribbean setting What is also quite unique is that Siva brings together close to 300 litre artifacts Which are held in eight international museum And this is the largest corpus of cocaine litric artifacts that was yet assembled in one project and These artifacts are really underutilized even so they provide potentially a highly Potential information But Over the last decade there has an explosion of research interest in the movement of materials people's and animals within and beyond the Caribbean Using groundbreaking scientific techniques, but the Bahamas have been remained largely Peripheral to this Emergent picture of such dynamic network Despite the great potential these collections are holding and this is mainly due to the fact That many of the more elaborated litric artifacts, which you can see behind me Were acquired outside a controlled archaeological context so that they that's why they have been basically forgotten They mostly entered the museum collections in the 19th century or early 20th century And they are perceived as lacking provenance Even so many are having clear associated information The National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington The Smithsonian Museums hold roughly half of the relevant collection for the Siva study in total 117 underwent initial review by portable XRF and Approximately 60 are included in the laser ablation analysis Which will then determine the isotope composition and the trace elements But we also have We also sampled artifacts from the Dominican Republic I.T. Cuba and Puerto Rico 38 of those are shortlisted for laser ablation And even so the project focuses on the Bahamas An understanding of the source material is required to better discern the position of the Lucane Archipelago in the network spanning the wider Caribbean region And hence the inclusion of those comparative materials from larger southern islands is quite crucial These selected litic artifacts many of which have been in the collection since the turn of the century Have not been part of any previous study But they offer a unique opportunity to study artifacts that are now rarely encountered in the archaeological record and In the Bahamas such artifacts were mainly deposited in caves and these were largely cleared for the Guano rich souls in the 19th centuries And then the artifacts are often dispersed locally So museum collections are therefore an integral component when looking at the wider archaeological Context for these islands without them we lose the connection to a large and important body of material that had clear value and meaning This is one of our first results So what you see here is basically the distribution of litic materials by islands in the Smithsonian collections the green is indicating Jade artifacts on the site and jaded artifacts the brown color other litologies And the size of causes indicating the amount of material that was Found in the collection and was what was really astonishing for us is that quite a big percentage of Artifacts, which are in those collections. I actually made out of Jade What was also interesting for us to see is that many of those artifacts were wrongly classified classified as serpentinite So we basically had a closer look and we could give new information about the litology of those artifacts So for us, it's really important to know how do these objects reflect the connections to other islands and do they support the current Hypothesized links based largely on diagnostic imported ceramics or do they connect in any unexpected ways? potentially even to the mainland so Our ongoing research will hopefully clarify this So by chemically finger printing those artifacts and comparing them to the database, which I presented Two talks before We will contribute to basically better understand How these former societies interacted with each other and were organized and operated But the problem is often that public and private institutions do not allow us to sample those artifacts Destructive analysis is a bad bad word when you talk to creators and restorators even so we can gain so much more information out of destructive analysis Then another yeah, sorry. I have to say that Then another thing is most of the time artifacts are not allowed to be transported So therefore what we really need is an instrument that allows us to sample those Those artifacts basically Microscopically Non-invasive and which is trans transportable So if we look at commercial available portable analytical techniques like portable XRF Which is non-destructive or portable laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, which is minimal invasive There are several limitations. So first of all, we need a calibration with matrix max Standards, then we cannot detect any isotope Compositions and we do not get the full range of trace elements So often those methods are not suited enough or sufficient enough to Discriminate between different geological sources of raw materials So what we also saw normally the best is To resolve the provenance of those geological materials is a combination of elemental Abundances and sometimes isotope compositions which might have for example this transium ratio we could use For Cuba we saw that was quite helpful So that is why I would like to present this new method that we are using what you see here is the portable The assembled part of laser-applation device which consists of an air-cold died Palm solid-state laser operating in the green light 532 nanometers The laser light is coupled into an optical fiber and is then leading the laser light into this laser-applation module there the light is basically reflected by a mirror and then Collimated and focused by two lenses on a sample surface Then we are a plating the material and then by a suction of an ambient airstream, which is generated by a membrane pump The material will be transported onto a sample holder and the sample holder has space for six filters and each filter represent basically one sample and Casper already pointed that out We might need more than one ablation because especially in Jedi's a neodymium is really low concentrated Strongsium is not such a big issue, but neodymium is really a problem and let us even worse So therefore currently we need at least 20 ablations But in my next slide I will show you that this damage is really Neglectable what I also would like to mention is that we also have the chance to handheld this Ablation module and then we are independent and we can sample basically everything independent of size and shape So again, I really would like to emphasize that the damage that we are causing is Neglectable and we are gaining so much more information out of this minimal destructive analysis So we have our sample on those small filters and then we are taking those the filters back to our Laboratories at the Frey University at Amsterdam for further geochemical analysis trace element analysis and isotope composition analysis These are really tiny tiny amounts of material so per ablation pit we are Generating a greater of approximately 100 to 130 micrometer in width and depths But still you see here the damage is neglectable. You cannot really see those Those ablation pits with the naked eye Normally what we are always aiming for is we are aiming for sampling in a broken surface But even if we have a pristine object most of the time there's a kind of label on one side So then we stick to that side and this is not on exhibition. So but even if you wouldn't see it One problem we have to face Is a blank issue? Contamination is a big issue when you're dealing with such small sample sizes. So the whole methodology is designed to Reduce and degrees the blank influence on all steps of sampling process and analysis What you couldn't see here what we are also having now is a kind of portable flow would that's basically a box Which we can put around the laser which we didn't had when we visited Caspar in Denmark at the National Museum But now we have this flow unit So basically we are pumping in ambient air So there's a lot slide over pressure and this prevents a dust to be sucked in while ablating And this is dramatically increasing the sampling bank because the samples are processed in a clean laboratory And there the plank is low anyhow, but the sampling was always a big issue and Using this metology the sampling metology we were able to convince a wide majority of conservators and museum people to give us access to their collections And they open up their collections for us and within the nexus project We went to a private collection on Grenada to sample jade artifacts mainly from the pearl site We went to visit Kaspar toffkat at the National Museum in Copenhagen to sample the artifacts from the Virgin Islands Very well known site as prosperity, which he already mentions Katarina Kuzufalki did a lot of work on the pendants and beads Then of course on our own exhibition together with the Caribbean research group in Leiden We did a lot of analysis on things from the musee del hombre dominicano musee altos de chavón in the Dominican Republic from the player grande site which Sebastian knippenberg talked about it's a really important site. We also think it's really important for jade distribution Then we also excavated in the Monte Christi area The El Mananchal site. It's also a very large site probably also very important and then garris davis He has a nice life actually because he had certain trips to the Caribbean in the last two months So he went to Puerto Rico to visit some samples and he's just back from Barbados and from for the Seabot project We had possibilities to sample really highly repetitive collections at really really nice museums American Museum of Natural History in New York where we also work together with George Harlow and Who also provided us with source rock samples from Guatemala. It's really hard to get the hands on those samples Peabody Museum of the University of Harvard Peabody Museum University of Yale Both Smithsonian Museums National Museum Natural History in Washington National Museum of American Indian But we also made trips of course to the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands to visit the museums there So you see Those two studies combined together with the soccer of study spends really a lot of artifacts These are just some pictures from our team For our trips. We had a lot of master students conducting their thesis within this project They were all happy going to the Bahamas going to the US and we are currently working on those results That's me sitting in New York in the American Museum of Natural History So to summarize the benefits of portable laser ablation sampling, we are avoiding the transport of the artifact It's quasi non-destructive because by no chance you can see the ablation pits Even if you look with a naked eye you have to search actively with the lens Then we are able to perform elemental and isotopic fingerprinting on ceramic glass pigments metal and lytic artifacts. So we are not only Reduced to one type of material now. There's a new laser at Yale who's going to be Produced he has it of it has a different wavelengths It has a UV wave length and this enables people there to Play also translucent materials something that is not Possible with our laser We do not the calibration on matrix match standards compared to portable x-ray for portable lips And the limits of detection are much lower Compared to those two methods. I Wanted to show you some provenance data This is an ongoing process Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do it. We are hard working on it but Basically preliminary results are showing that the Dominican Republic was an important source But still we cannot rule out that even in late ceramic age some artifacts may have come from Guatemala and Then I also would like to point out something from colleagues recent research So also you stated that there's a big discrepancy and how do you say? controversy going on between researchers about the occurrence of Jeddard in early ceramic side-age especially on Hispaniola we couldn't find any early ceramic side ages That is why people always say that it comes later with late ceramic age Sides, but we clearly have jades from early ceramic Jade age sites from the Virgin Islands and also from Grenada So this is going to be really interesting whether or not we can prove that there was actually Jade Present and then I also want to pinpoint what's the study conducted and published by Hallow now in 2019 on three cells from San Salvador Bahamas Well, you also said well to access relief it well to the signature of the Dominican Republic But even so he's not ruling out that there might be an unknown source and one fits very well to Cuba So this is always what we have to keep in our minds that there are probably more unknown sources Which are yet need to be discovered Thank you so much for your attention