SOME REMARKS REGARDING THE PETROLOGIC STUDY OF SEVERAL BRONZE AGE STONE AXES UNCOVERED ON THE SUCEAVA PLATEAU (NORTHEAST ROMANIA).

The scope of this paper is a very actual subject within the Romanian archaeology: the identification of the raw matter used to manufacture certain categories of prehistoric stone tool inventory, as well as the tracing of its provenance. The artifacts subjected to the analysis originate within the Suceava Plateau, a subunit of the Moldavian Plateau, located in the Northeastern Romania, a region well-known for its rich Bronze Age finds. From a geo-structural point of view, the Suceava Plateau overlays the Moldavian Platform, this is in fact the southwestern edge of the East European Platform. Out of the nine-sample group selected for the analysis, eight are fragments of stone axes of Early and Middle Bronze Age (around 3500-1500 BC); the remaining sample was extracted from the principal material used to raise one of the tumuli of the Bronze Age barrow cemetery of Horodnic de Jos (Suceava Co.), investigated by the archaeologists of Suceava between 2012 and 2013. The authors' aim is to identify the source area of the raw material, on the basis of the thin microscopy sections of the samples. The final conclusions are that the dominant materials are the effusive rocks originating in the neogene volcanic rocks of the inner piedmont of the Eastern Carpathians, as well as the rocky intrusions within wildflysch formations (Hauterivian -- Albian) of the Rarau Syncline, located in the north-central area of the same mountain range. Both sources are located at around 150 km from the central part of the Suceava Plateau, where are located the archaeological sites out of which the samples were taken. Three of the analyzed axes are made of detritic sedimentary rocks originating in two different geostructural units -- the Moldavian Platform and the Carpathian Flysch -- easy to procure rocks even today, from outcrops or riverbeds. Concurrently, this analysis raises some issues: how well-structured a process was the prospection, extraction and shipment of raw material? Were there traveling craftsmen, production and distribution/redistribution centers for this type of artifacts? It is worth noting that a multitude of stone axes types, which cover chronologically almost 1500 years, and pertain culturally to different prehistoric civilizations, show the same area of origin for their raw material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]