Introduction

Why write a provenance study, when the main interest on terrigenous sediments is being shifted towards facies interpretation, basin fill, seismic stratigraphy and the like? We know that provenance work has yielded many results until now, but the main emphasis of modern studies has been on big rivers at passive margins, the results being mostly qualitative, with little regard to mass balances. Moreover, almost as a rule, only a limited number of rivers of a given area, if not only one, were usually investigated. As a consequence, no statistical tests to prove the reliability of the findings could be undertaken.