Folia archeologica 45.

Tóth Endre: Dr. Soproni Sándor szakirodalmi munkássága

FOLIA ARCI IAKOLOGICA XLV. 1996. BUDAPEST PALAEOLITHIC TOOLS MADE OF ROCK CRYSTAL AND THEIR PRELIMINARY FLUID INCLUSION INVESTIGATION Viola T. DOBOSI (Hungarian National Museum) István GATTER (Mineralogical Department of the Eötvös L. University) Introduction The raw material basis of the Hungarian Upper Palaeolithic is extremely colourful, both in a direct and indirect sense. On one hand, the silices of sedimentary and sensu lato "hydrothermal" origin used in large quantities have a great variety of colours; on the other hand, the expanding system of relations of the Upper Palaeolithic people uncovered a great number of raw material sources during their permanent movement. In certain cases, the distance between the geological source and the site the artefact was collected from exceeds several hundred kilometres. Some sites or cultural horizons within the Gravettian entity have been examined in terms of raw material use, but 110 general rules could be observed yet. Within the Carpathian Basin, which is a fairly closed geographical unit, we can delineate the circulation of raw materials by the help of known geological rock samples. Compared to the Upper Palaeolithic, "the action radius" of the individual communities increased essentially. The use of special materials like silex from the Prut region can reach as much as 80% at the site Esztergom-Gyurgyalag. In case of the ' pebble-Gravettian" settlements, the use of obsidian seems to indicate direct relations to the source region. On the Hungarian Upper Palaeolithic sites, artefacts made of rock crystal and their production debris belong to rare and exotic objects. This paper aims at analysing 14 pieces of rock crystal tools preserved in die Hungarian National Museum, from the aspects of mineralogy and archaeology. Their archaeological description is, so to say, traditional. The basis of the mineralogical investigation is a special quality of the raw material, i.e., the study of fluid inclusions. Minerals originating from the melt, fluids or products of recrystallisation of the Earth's crust in vapour, gas and solid state will have "inclusions", that is, remains from their previous environment carrying the physicochemical marks of the conditions of formation. The included phases can be studied at room temperature by microscope without the danger of destruction to the object. On the basis of the phases of the inclusion, solid state, fluid and gaseous inclusions can be divided. Compared to the host mineral, the genetical state of the inclusions are very important, thus we have primary (syngenetical), transitional (formed in the break periods of the formation of the mineral) and secondary (after the formation of the mineral) inclusions. The study of the inclusions entered the standard methodology of geosciences during the 70-ies by the wide application of the so-called "phase transition stud-