 I'm going to talk about amber fakes or what we think are amber fake beads. The presentation says two unusual cases but actually last week we found a third one. So we're going to talk about three cases of coated beads that resembles amber. So amber has quality, it's translucent, it's reddish-yellow. And it's highly demand for personal ornamentation for making beads, pendants, charns, every kind of many kinds of personal ornaments. There are also some imitations made of other local or not so local stones that might resemble amber as these citrine quartz beads. Many other also maicas that are also yellow or reddish-yellow translucent, they are using and third, fourth, third millennium BC in the Iberian Peninsula, they are using several materials that might be considered perhaps imitations or amber fakes. What we have found here are unusual cases that they are using a resin, we'll see we'll see it on the next slide, for coating local mainly shells and seeds to produce beads that resemble amber. This technique has been not for resembling amber but in Near East they are using a procedure to transform bone and produce a blue coating that resembles or imitates turquoise, so it's more or less the same thing, it's getting some raw material locally available and performing some technical procedures that makes those low non-valuable materials more valuable because they resemble something that is really valuable. So we have here the first two cases that we have already documented, so you can see there we have a core that's a bead and a coating, a coating. If you see this one it's exactly visually identical to some amber beads that appear together with this one, so we've got actually amber beads mixed up with these fake amber beads. So you see here these are the new case that's from Sao Paulo and they really resemble what it's amber, you see these are amber from Pragansi in Portugal, as you can see these ones really resemble that one. So we present here three sites, Covalent Gigant, La Molina and Sao Paulo II, I'm going to go on through the archaeological context very quickly. So Covalent Gigant, it's a 1600-1400 BC site, it's a Bronze Age site, but they appear gold tutuli objects, several beads, two of them have been already studied and published and has been documented as Sicilian amber. So we have an association of this technique here with Sicilian amber. We call La Molina, it's an early 3rd millennium BC artificial cave, it has two faces in the area where they found the beads. There are three adults, they are ivory objects, they are cinnabar, rock crystal arrowheads, so we've got somehow wealthy burials, both of them. The Bronze Age one of Covalent Gigant, we have gold tutuli, this one with cinnabar, rock crystal ivory and Sao Paulo II in Almada, it's also an artificial cave, it has a minimum number of individuals of 254, and we found typical grave goods for this period, it's 4th millennial BC, and we've got as well two amber beads, two Sicilian amber beads together, in this case, what you've seen before as being two fake beads for La Molina, we don't have amber there, four fake beads for Covalent Gigant and two amber beads, and in this case we've got two Sicilian amber beads and 316 fake beads, that is this necklace. So we are working on this material, we have documented more coated resins, there's one more site, Bronze Age site, but we're not sure that if this pine resin must be another kind of resin, so we are not presenting it here. So from an unusual case we are finding that this is more usual than we thought. For characterizing the material, this coating, we've been using electron microscope, basically the microproof for chemical composition, handheld EDX analyzer as well for chemical composition, infrared spectroscopy with microscope and on the pellet, on transmission mode, XRZ diffraction and non-destructive one with the parallel beam and the mirrors, the gavel mirrors and Raman spectroscopy, this kind is a micro-Raman, confocal micro-Raman. So the first thing we made was the chemical composition, so we found that we've got in the core of the bead, it's the bead you can see here, it's a shell, it's clearly a shell. And as well, on the rest of this coating, we found that it's calcium, basically it's calcite from the cave, and we found as well phosphorus, so as you may know, phosphorus and calcium are the main components of bones. So what we see on this superficial analysis as they are non-destructive, we are always analyzing the surface of the bead on this coating, it's most likely the soft bone that has recrystallized over the resin together with post-depositional calcite. When we make a micro-FTR, we see here that we have a specific band for the ragonite, this one at 1087, that corresponds to the core, and we have as well the calcite and the PO-bonding vibrations corresponding to the bone. So what we have here is we have a core bead made of a marine moss, and the post-depositional process that has fixed over the resin, a calcite and calcium phosphate. So you can see here, if this is a calcite, and see here the appetite, you can see here the resin, and here how the layering of this bead is. So you see like three phases, we'll go on it later. This is an oxidized phase of the resin, this is the resin oxidized phase, and a superficial deposition of the calcite together with the recrystallization of bones from the burial. So what we see with the micro-XRF is what I've said, a superficial layer made by recrystallization of the heart tissue human bones plus a precipitation of calcite from the cave and the ragonite of the core. So you can see here, well, these are nice microscope photographs of the coatings, that it's really, you've seen on the microscope an amber bead, it's just like this, it's really very, very similar. So we didn't see the resin with the micro-XRF, we didn't see it neither with the XRD or the Raman. So we decided to make a pellet and make an FTIR on the transmission mode, and reading, making a search of, a bibliography search, we've realized that it would be made perhaps be possible to differentiate between different species of producing these natural resins by FTIR. So we proceed, make FTIR, well, now I'm going to talk a little bit about the resins because this is needed to understand the FTIR spectra that we are going to discuss later. So the resins may be of two kinds of insects or exudates for certain types of tree. So they are composed, they harden by evaporation of the volatiles and the partial oxidative polymerization of some of their components. This meaning that these are the terpenoids that corresponds to coniferate, leguminoside, and the penis species. Each of these species produce resins, exudate resins with different mixtures of components than when they age, results on different secondary compounds due to the oxidation, reduction, microbial activity. So with time, avitans that are the main components of pine resins, transforms to abiotic acid, the hydrobiotic acid, also the hydrobiotic acid, and 15 hydroxy, 7 oxo, the hydrobiotic acid. So we found that resins are complex mixtures of molecules that change in time with aging and that we can identify all these components, the sub-products of the aging of these molecules. So what we got, it's on the fingerprint region, it's an aspect like this, where there are no really well-defined bands, but bands are much better than the ones we appreciate on the micro FTR, that it's polluted with phosphate due to the recrystallization of human heart tissue, that's this band here, this big band. We found the avitine, carbon-carbon skeletal vibrations, it's overlap here as well, the abiotic acid, the hydrobiotic acid, all the molecules that we've been known by lecture to that has, they are sub-products of aging of these detergents. So the problem is how do we find these equivalent resins aged by 5,000 years? So the best thing we've got, we have, is matched with 14th century aged penis resins, so there has been people from here from Barcelona studying the resins that has been applied to paintings from 14th century and have made a study of how these resins have aged with time. We find a fairly good match with the penis alipensis resins, aged resins. So we have to make the second derivative, gap derivative, to find the position of the bands, you see here a lot of bands and numbers, and you may not see them clearly defined. You make the second derivative, you make, you build a function to determine where the maximums and the minimums are, you can accurately identify the position of the bands and compare them with the, I'm finishing, with the, with the references. So all these are more spectral and this is on the OHCH vibrational area. We have another match with penis alipensis as the anthropological analysis on the same layer of charcoal finds, cobala gigante confirms that we have used penis alipensis there. So we see it on the spectra, we have the charcoal, so it might be obvious to say that we have a good match. And then you see the European distribution map for penis alipensis. We are in an area of high concentration of this species. So we have, well, this is the band identification for all of them. This is the Sao Paulo dos bits, that's from this, from this necklace, as you can see, resembles amber, you see some details as well of the resin here, penis resin. In the case of La Molina, we see as well more things, we, we found, well, the resin it's covered by a red pigment and we think it's post-depositional because we have the perforation of the bit has been collapsed by calcium carbonate. It's from the, it's post-depositional and the cyanobase sprinkled over the calcium carbonate. So we think it's calcium carbonate that's post-depositional and the cyanobase as well. So we can almost discard the last individual barrier of those three and we think we can match the bit to one of those in the real world based on this, on this fact. So on XRD that showed here, it's an oxidized polymerized abitem, this broad peak indicates that. We see here calcite and, and the cyanobar and the Ronan spectra confirmed that it's a pigment, it's cyanobar. So we think the cyanobase sprinkled over a white post-depositional calcite matrix and the coating it's made as an imitation or amber fake covering this bit. This bit is not gel, in this case it's a seed. What you see here on this bit, these black stains are manganese. So it's a transfer from some other thing that has that pattern, that pattern, like square pattern, maybe a bag, some, some textile, some kind of fiber that has been stained in black, something like that, that it's as well a tiny bit. So what we have here, what we have seen here is that we have amber imitation, fake amber, it has a similar appearance, it's made with locally available raw materials, it's a resin, it's locally available in all of the sites, seeds and shell bits, in those cases that the bits are from maritime environment and in all the three cases, these fake bits are associated to Sicilian amber, amber bits. So these are fakes and they have access to, to Sicilian amber, what are these? It's a middle man cheating them, so they're buying like more amounts, a big amounts of amber and they give two amber bits and four pine coated bits. Well, that's the question we bring here, we don't really know. So well, this is final remarks, pine resin coated bits, La Molina we think it's as well an amber fake, it's not made to be red, locally available raw materials. These resin coatings made the bit resemble amber, so the audience will be confused, we think it's amber bit, we have other imitations made with carnelian quartz, mica, other translucent bits, also imitating amber. We have an amber equivalence and they appear associated to Sicilian amber in wealthy burials with ivory, gold, cyanobar, all things we consider, they are prestige things. So well, maybe a low cost production, it's an easy way to increase the number of valuables. They've been cheated, they don't have other things, they don't have access to these exchange liquids, well, we are working on it, so any suggestions on this matter is welcome, so thank you for your patience.