Results indicate that an appropriately designed multivariate strategy can be an effective tool for evaluating provenance hypotheses for bloomery iron artifacts.
Apart from the rather probable derivation from cholē (the word for bile and a dominant term in the humoral theory, which is of Hippocratic and not Galenic [ 1 ] provenance), one more hypothesis has been suggested.
It is striking that although adaptation to individual trees has been demonstrated in oak gallwasp interactions (Egan and Ott 2007), none of our gall types showed declining abundance with increasing phenological mismatch between native oaks and planted provenances, rejecting our local adaptation hypothesis.
Most importantly, we did not observe the highest photoprotection in the provenances, that exhibit lower assimilation rates, as suggested by our hypothesis, but rather in the provenances, which were able to maintain higher assimilation rates.
A multi-analytical procedure including X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD), scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDS), micro X-ray fluorescence (µ-XRF) and lead isotope ratio mass spectrometry (LIRMS), was used to characterize these objects thus providing hypotheses on the possible provenance of metallic raw materials.
The hypothesis also predicts that provenances selected to match conditions furthest in the future should be least well matched to current conditions and so perform least well in the present.
We test this hypothesis using multiple performance measures for 20 provenances planted at the La Petite Charnie provenance trial, selected to maximize the available range in source latitude and longitude as well as the mismatch in climate between the provenance trial and the provenance origin.
According these data our hypothesis was of obsidian artefacts from different provenance, so we decided to apply the source discrimination approach to these samples using the previous obsidian samples as reference.
This hypothesis predicts that performance of locally native provenances will decline over time – and recent rapid climate change may mean that populations of long-lived trees are already somewhat mismatched to the conditions in which they grow.
The observed differences in gene expression between Leiria and Tamrabta supported the hypothesis that genetic and epigenetic factors of the provenances play a significant role in the modulation of specific responses to environmental conditions.
