Despite 35 years of obsidian studies in the central Mediterranean, no systematic program of field survey and documentation, physical and chemical analysis, and detailed publication has been completed for the obsidian sources on the island of Pantelleria (Italy). Furthermore, in most earlier provenance studies only a few artifacts per site were analyzed, so that only five sites in central and southern Italy, Sicily, Malta and North Africa have ten or more analyses, thus limiting the determination of regional and/or chronological patterns of obsidian use. The summer 2000 geoarchaeological survey of the obsidian sources of Pantelleria, in collaboration with the superintendency of the Province of Trapani, the University of Bologna, and the Archeoclub of Pantelleria, will redress these circumstances through the integration of typological, technological, and analytical methods. A systematic approach to the location, documentation, and characterization of the geological sources will be followed by the study and provenance analysis of significant numbers of archaeological artifacts.

The resulting data will reveal much not only about early settlement and cultural development on the central Mediterranean islands, but will also be used to explicitly test models of navigational and maritime transport capabilities, of specific interconnections between island and mainland populations, and of the sociopolitical and economic role of obsidian and other raw materials in prehistoric Mediterranean societies.