Thermoluminescence dating of pottery and burnt stones from Scandinavian archaeological sites

Authors

• Vagn Mejdahl

Abstract

While methods for dating pottery by thermoluminescence (TL) were established more than a decade ago, burnt stones, in particular granites, turned out to be a more difficult material to respond to this method because of the nonuniform distribution of their radioactive constituents as well as the minerals present in their matrix.

By using large grains (0.1-5 mm) of feldspars we have succeeded in developing a method that allows TL dating of burnt stones as weil as pottery. The method has been used extensively during the last few years for dating material from archaeological excavations in the Nordic countries. Current progress in the method is reported and a number of dating results are presented and discussed .