Coupled U-series and OSL dating of a Late Pleistocene cave sediment sequence, Morocco, North Africa: Significance for constructing Palaeolithic chronologies

Abstract

Cave sequences provide some of the most important archives of Palaeolithic archaeology that are currently available. The potential value of such sequences is, however, frequently limited by the problems associated with constructing robust chronologies for archaeologically significant levels. In this study, we apply 230Th/U and OSL SAR techniques to the dating of deposits from the Calcareous Group at Grotte des Pigeons, Taforalt, eastern Morocco. The advantage of combining these techniques is: 1) they allow the cross-checking of chronologies derived from independent sets of measurements and assumptions, and 2) they date different facies of cave sediments (i.e. clastic cave sediments as opposed to cave precipitates such as speleothems) allowing the timing of deposition by different cave processes to be constrained more robustly. The age estimates derived by these techniques from different sampling locations are in good agreement with one another, suggesting the potential of these techniques when used in tandem for producing more robust chronologies of Palaeolithic sequences. The deposition of the Calcareous Group is placed within the middle to late part of MIS 5 (MIS 5c to 5a). Furthermore, the Bayesian analysis of the dates derived in this study along with those that have been previously published, allows the duration of deposition of this unit to be estimated at 25.4 ± 3.7 ka (mean ± 1σ). The paper concludes by discussing the significance of these ages for the archaeology of the Taforalt sequence. We suggest that the collection of samples for multiple independent dating methods in direct association combined with the use of careful, stratigraphic constraints in Bayesian models results in the most robust dates available for such cave sequences.