Quality assurance in luminescence dating

Recent advances in luminescence dating have led to increasing application of the technique to sediments from a wide range of depositional environments, many of which are characterised by rapid transport and deposition under turbid conditions. The complete zeroing of the luminescence signal, by exposure to light, is critical to obtaining an accurate age for deposition of the sediment, before any geomorphological or palaeoenvironmental reconstructions can be undertaken based on this chronology. Comparison of luminescence dates with independent age control is rare, due to a lack of suitable material in natural contexts and thus the accuracy of the luminescence dating technique has yet to be proven in many depositional environments. There is therefore a clear need for both quality assurance in luminescence dating and a method for assessing the accuracy of each date. This paper describes and demonstrates a quality assurance method that can be used as part of a routine dating programme and which can discriminate against samples which would give inaccurate dates. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.