A SURVEY OF SOME NEW APPROACHES IN EXTENDING THE MAXIMUM AGE LIMIT AND ACCURACY OF LUMINESCENCE APPLICATION TO ARCHEOLOGICAL CHRONOMETRY

Abstract

In recent years considerable effort has been made to extend the dating limits and accuracies of luminescence dating and its applications to archeological sciences. These include, for example, the use of single grains for dating (Duller 2008: 589‐612; Jacobs and Roberts 2007: 210‐223), research on athermal fading to explore the use of feldspars (with higher saturation dose) for dating (Huntley 2006: 1359‐1365; Lamothe and Auclair 1999: 319‐323), the use of red TL for the dating of volcanic ash (Fattahi and Stokes 2003: 647‐660; Visocekas and Guérin 2006: 942‐947)    and direct dating of archeological contexts (Chawla and Singhvi 1989: 416‐418; Singhvi et al. 1986: 205‐207). Use of some of these have provided useful new data on chronometry and have placed luminescence dating on the centre stage amongst other chronometric techniques available for the dating archeological sites and several important results on aspects of human dispersal and chronometry have been reported (Anikovich et al. 2007: 223‐226; Mellars 2006: 796‐800; Petraglia et al. 2007: 114‐116; Roberts 1997: 819‐892; Singhvi et al. 1998: 23-83).   This contribution outlines some new ideas that offer prospects of developing the luminescence dating technique further and help extend the age range of its applications in archeology. These applications are based on consideration of the manner in which the radiation dose is deposited in natural samples and aim to refine the protocols that are currently used for the estimation of equivalent dose.