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Variously, researchers have closely examined obsidian artifacts to understand ancient social and economic structures, as in Raymond V. Sidrys's 1976 study, or to glean aspects of cultural identity, as in M. Steven Shackley's 2002 study. Studies of the Malia archaeological site on the Mediterranean island of Crete have shown that significant changes to building styles-changes consistent with an influx of people from another culture elsewhere in the Mediterranean-occurred from the Middle Bronze Age to the Late Bronze Age. In a 2022 study, however, Tristan Carter and Vassilis Kilikoglou found that obsidian-object production methods at Malia stayed remarkably consistent during this architectural transition, which they interpret as indicative of local cultural continuity in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages.