It is a great pleasure to join in the activities
of the SAS Bulletin. I hope to contribute in a variety of ways,
with a view to keep you informed on developments in dating technology,
to comment on interesting and controversial findings, and to suggest where
to find great reading. This issue, Iķll introduce myself and then whet
your appetite for the dating game with some recent developments in the
field. My work is focused on the use of electron spin resonance (ESR),
luminescence and uranium series dating, and aspects of the development
of the former two methods. I began my Ph.D. work in geology in 1985 at
Florida State University on ESR in quartz as old as one billion years.
I rapidly moved up the geological timescale when I realized I could contribute
to problems in Palaeolithic archaeology within Quaternary time, which encompasses
the last two million years of earth history. Since beginning my work on
ģthings archaeologicalī while on a postdoctoral fellowship at the University
of Cambridge (UK) in the Godwin Lab, Subdepartment of Quaternary Research,
I moved to Canada in 1992 to continue this work at McMaster University
Department of Geology.
Being the skeptic that I am, my work with ESR dating
of tooth enamel has involved a great deal of dating intercomparison and
fundamental study, and this has taken me into the field to a large number
of sites in contexts ranging from desert environments to open river valleys
and karstic caves in humid climates. This range of field experiences has
been broadened since I built a luminescence dating laboratory, where I
work on burned flint with thermoluminescence and windblown and waterlain
sediments using optically stimulated luminescence dating techniques. With
these approaches, I am currently dating the stone tool assemblages at Rosh
Ein Mor and Boker Tachtit in the dry wadis of the Negev desert of Israel
through a grant from the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation. Beyond the archaeological
realm, I use these dating techniques in problems of dating faults and for
studying questions of ancient sea level and regional tectonic motion. I
also use mass spectroscopy for high precision U series dating of archaeological
calcite, teeth and ostrich egg shell.
Beyond dating, I recently began a collaboration
with Dr. Kevin Smith of the Buffalo Museum of Science on using ESR to determine
the geological age of jaspers used in stone tools in the Arctic. In particular,
we are working on the provenance of a jasper microblade core which unexpectedly
turned up in an Icelandic site dated to circa AD 870. The identity of the
source material for this object is critical to long established ideas about
the Norse as the earliest inhabitants of Iceland. Our preliminary results,
supported by neutron activation analysis, suggest that the source is a
local Icelandic jasper of young geological age, raising the possibility
of an earlier Arctic Palaeoindian presence in Iceland. This work has been
exciting and quite different from the dating research.
Recent important publications for the ESR and Luminescence
dating community and the end users of these technologies are the latest
issues of Radiation Measurements (v. 27, 1997) and Quaternary Science
Reviews (Quaternary Geochronology v. 16, 1997). These are the conference
proceedings of the 8th International Conference on ESR and Luminescence
Dating, held in Canberra, Australia from 22 26 April, 1996. In these volumes
readers will find the most recent technical discussions on the dating methodologies,
and some exciting new dating results, as well as important developments
in instrumentation. In addition, a special edition of Radiation Measurements
was organized by Ann Wintle (Institute of Earth Studies, Aberystwyth, Wales)
and Steve McKeever (Department of Physics, Oklahoma State University, USA).
Publication is schedulated for late 1997 and it will contain a series of
invited review articles of specific applications in these fields of dating
research. My own contribution is entitled Electron Spin Resonance Dating
in Quaternary Science and Archaeometry, and there will also be a review
article from Dr. Bert Roberts of La Trobe University on Luminescence Dating
in Archaeology.