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Monday, April 07, 2008
Luminescence Poster
You can follow this link to a pdf of my SAA poster. I think that Luminescence dating has a bright future in archaeology, despite the somewhat rocky result for these projects.
Dude, I really appreciated the pun in the post. So I read it over and it looks cool, but I have a hard time getting past the fact that particles have to have had significant amount of exposure to sunlight or heat to be "reset". How do you account for partial exposure due to something covering it, rapid deposition, etc.? How do you go about choosing your sample? If you can enlighten me, I'd appreciate it. Sorry, had to do it.
You've identified the critical problem my brother. It looks like these analyses are moving towards a single rock grain as the unit of analysis, the idea being that you could identify which individual particles were only partially reset and throw them out.
I think that was the problem with the canal sediment, some rock grains had their clocks fully reset by light exposure while they were suspended in the canal water, others had their clocks partially reset, and still others had clocks that were not reset (which would yield geologic dates!). Because we looked at several grains at the same time, the dates were averages. It's like the difference between dating pooled charcoal and a single twig via C14.
The grains in the sherd were much better, probably because the grains were evenly heated. For now, I feel good about TL analysis of sherds (though a single grain approach here would probably be better as well), but that for canal sediment, we need to go towards single-grain dating.
2 comments:
Dude, I really appreciated the pun in the post. So I read it over and it looks cool, but I have a hard time getting past the fact that particles have to have had significant amount of exposure to sunlight or heat to be "reset". How do you account for partial exposure due to something covering it, rapid deposition, etc.? How do you go about choosing your sample? If you can enlighten me, I'd appreciate it. Sorry, had to do it.
You've identified the critical problem my brother. It looks like these analyses are moving towards a single rock grain as the unit of analysis, the idea being that you could identify which individual particles were only partially reset and throw them out.
I think that was the problem with the canal sediment, some rock grains had their clocks fully reset by light exposure while they were suspended in the canal water, others had their clocks partially reset, and still others had clocks that were not reset (which would yield geologic dates!). Because we looked at several grains at the same time, the dates were averages. It's like the difference between dating pooled charcoal and a single twig via C14.
The grains in the sherd were much better, probably because the grains were evenly heated. For now, I feel good about TL analysis of sherds (though a single grain approach here would probably be better as well), but that for canal sediment, we need to go towards single-grain dating.
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