Mapping procurement areas of lithic resources and mobility patterns: A GIS-based approach to the early colonization of Western Mediterranean islands

Is it possible to define based on the circulation of chert and obsidian the patterns of mobility and the procurement strategies of lithic resources among the first inhabitants of the Western Mediterranean islands of Corsica and Sardinia? This paper tackles this question through the following research objectives: 1) To build, through bibliographic research, a systematic database including all published data concerning the presence of chert and obsidian artefacts in Sardinian-Corsican sites dated to the Pre-Neolithic and the Early Neolithic; 2) To create a specific cartography on the geographical distribution of these lithotypes across the two studied islands. Data have been geo-referenced with the QGIS 3.20 open-source software, both to make them visible on the map and to introduce the fundamental variables of space-territory into the research; and 3) To define mobility patterns for the supply of chert and obsidian based on the available results of provenance analyses, using QGIS to draw the movement lines from the findspot to the source with the principle of the minimum effort: that is, through the development of a Least Cost Path Analysis (LCPA). This is to say that the tracing of the probable routes followed by humans will be based on the calculation of the shortest distances from the raw material sources to their findspots based on orography and topographic variables. The results on the procurement areas and mobility patterns to perform specific tasks, as lithic procurement, will contribute to the debate on resource management and landscape knowledge of early human groups colonizing insular environments.