[1] A new method for dating well-bleached sediments is presented, with results for thirteen samples from China. The method uses an isochron constructed from the measurement of natural radiation doses received by potassium-feldspar grains in a range of grain sizes using the infrared stimulated luminescence (IRSL) signal. The age of deposition of the sediment is calculated from this isochron and ...

Recent exploratory efforts to reveal the evolution and the climatic history of Mars have shown that the planet is still active. The surface of Mars has been, and continues to be, shaped by fluvial, eolian and glacial processes. The timeframe of these events is, however, poorly established. We describe efforts and challenges to adapt optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating for robotic in-...

Rock-walled archaeological features are notoriously hard to date, largely because of the absence of suitable organic material for radiocarbon dating. This study demonstrates the efficacy of dating clam garden wall construction using optical dating, and uses optical ages to determine how sedimentation rates in the intertidal zone are affected by clam garden construction. Clam gardens are rock-wa...

Single-grain measurements become common practice in fission track, Ar / Ar, U-Pb, (U-Th)/He and optical dating. Because single-grain signals are small, the measurement uncertainties of single-grain ages are typically larger and more variable than those of multi-grain aliquots of the same sample. Invented by Rex Galbraith in 1988, the radial plot is a graphical method for comparing several estim...

The Vale do Forno archaeological sites (Alpiarça, central Portugal) document the earliest human occupation in the Lower Tejo River, well established in geomorphological and environmental terms, within the Middle Pleistocene. In a staircase of six fluvial terraces, the Palaeolithic sites were found on the T4 terrace (þ24 m, above river bed) which is made of a basal Lower Gravels unit (LG) and an...

This study focused on the luminescence dating of sediments from Lake El’gygytgyn, a meteorite impact crater 100 km north of the Arctic Circle in northeast Siberia, formed 3.58 Ma ago. The sediment is principally eolian deposited in to a lake with nearly permanently ice. The fine-grained polymineral and quartz extracts taken from nine distinct levels from the upper 12.3 m of sediment core PG1351...