Van de Velde Thomas. Black magic bitumen: an archaeometrical approach to 5000 years of bitumen imports in the Persian Gulf

Ghent: Ghent University, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, 2015. — 201 p.The initial aim of the research, presented in this book, was to track bitumen throughout the history of the Persian Gulf and use that information to identify trading networks and contacts between the users of the bitumen (i.e. the population on several sites in the Gulf) and their supplier(s). That way, it was also possible to characterize the nature of the trade and to form several hypothesis on the specific trade in bitumen. Geochemical techniques, originally developed for the petroleum industry and the Earth Sciences, were used to detect the origin of the bitumen samples. These studies include the use of GC-MS and Stable Carbon Isotope Analysis.