Abstract
Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) is applied to quartz extracted from mud mortar collected from Chavin de Huantar, an early Andean monumental center. The samples appear to have been only partially exposed to sunlight during construction, so a minimum age model is applied to equivalent dose distributions. Complications, including complex radioactivity, low sensitivity of the quartz, and limited sample, prevent high precision, but the 14 dates obtained cluster around 1000 BC largely in agreement with radiocarbon assays on charcoal also collected from the mortar. Results suggest a relatively rapid construction for the monument. This work develops OSL as a method for directly dating architectural mortar.
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