Luminescence dating of sediment mounds associated with shaft and gallery irrigation systems

Abstract

Citation for published item:fili'D sFuF nd tnkowskiD xFFtF nd qerrrdD gFwF nd quti¡ errezD eF nd ilkinsonD uFxF @PHIWA 9vuminesene dting of sediment mounds X pplition to shft nd gllery irrigtion systemsF9D tournl of rid environmentsFD ITS F ppF QRERSF Further information on publisher's website: httpsXGGdoiForgGIHFIHITGjFjridenvFPHIWFHPFHHR Publisher's copyright statement: c 2019 This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractOptically stimulated luminescence (OSL) techniques, supported by geomorphological analysis, have been applied to date the construction of shaft and gallery irrigation systems, more commonly referred to as qanats, falaj and foggara. The approach developed was tested on four hydraulic systems located in semi-arid landscape settings, three in Murcia, Spain, and the fourth in the Sus Tekna region, Morocco. Excavation of the characteristic sediment mounds that surround each ventilation shaft enabled a detailed examination of strata containing upcast deposits and their assignment to the main stages in the construction and use of the hydraulic feature. OSL techniques with single grain resolution applied to samples taken from the key strata provided age estimates for their deposition on the mound and, from these, dating of the construction and use of the system. Of the four irrigation systems analysed, the OSL dates indicated that the youngest had been constructed in the 19 th century AD and the oldest, located in Murcia, was dated to the Roman period. The latter is of archaeological significance because the introduction of this particular form of hydraulic technology to Spain is widely identified as an Islamic innovation of the early 8th century AD.

Bettina Schulz Paulsson. Time and Stone: The Emergence and Development of Megaliths and Megalithic Societies in Europe (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2017, xiv and 376pp., 209 colour and b/w figs., 10 tables, hbk, ISBN 9781784916855)

“…in combination with micromorphology or profiling) are achieving much improved precision (e.g. Bailiff et al, 2019). Equally, their inclusion (especially in the case of existing measurements) within Bayesian models in combination with radiocarbon measurements increases their precision even more (Lanos & Philippe, 2017).…”