Updated Characterisation of White Saint-Béat Marble. Discrimination Parameters from Classical Marbles

Saint-Béat marble (Central French Pyrenees) is considered one of the most famous Roman Gaul marbles by archaeomaterials researchers. White, grey and banded greyish varieties were exploited during Roman times, to be used mainly in sculpture (including sarcophagi), decorative architecture and epigraphy, primarily in Southern Gaul, but they were also distributed beyond the Hispanic border. A multi-method approach combining petrography, spectrophotometry, cathodoluminescence with EDX spectroscopy and stable C and O isotope analysis was applied to a new collection of samples from quarries along both banks of the Garonne River, next to Saint-Béat village. This work aims to highlight the most useful parameters to discriminate one of the Saint-Béat marble varieties (the coarse-grained white), from other Classical and Hispanic marbles of similar features. This updated characterisation has been successfully checked with Roman artefacts from different archaeological sites of the Hispania Tarraconensis Province.