The temple of Apollo at Didyma in western Anatolia has a par ticularly long building history from ca. 300 B.C. until well into the Roman era. During this period, various types of white mar ble were used. To determine their provenance, petrology and iso tope analyses of carbon and oxygen were combined with consid erations of practicability and historical probability. Four different marble sources were identified: Milesian and Herakleian marbles, both quarried around Lake Bafa about 26 km to the

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... ortheast of Didyma, marble from Aliki on the Island of Thasos, and Proconnesian marble from the Island of Marmara. Mapping of these marbles on the temple revealed that they were employed during different periods. Whereas Milesian marble was used most wide ly during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Thasian marble was used only for a short time during the 2 nd c. B.C.; Herakleian marble was employed during the later Hellenistic and early Roman periods and Proconnesian marble was used in the Roman era. Identifying the marble types of various origins, thus, con tributes considerably to the discrimination of individual build ing phases and, especially, to the attribution of particular parts of the architecture to these phases.