Heritage Cases

The aim of this research is to provide radiometric ages for sediment deposition at the Middle Stone Age sites of Klipdrift and Klasies River, using luminescence dating techniques. This analysis will be carried out by Dr Simon Armitage at the Royal Holloway Luminescence Dating Laboratory. Dr Armitage has nearly 20 years of experience in dating African geological and archaeological sediments, and has directed the Royal Holloway laboratory since 2006. Samples were collected under the supervision of Prof. Christopher Henshilwood (Klipdrift) and Prof. Sarah Wurz (Klasies River) from the University of the Witwatersrant. Luminescence measurements will be made on pure sand-sized quartz or feldspar extracted from the bulk sediment extracted from the opaque plastic tubes, while geochemical analysis will be carried out on homogenised (mechanically crushed) material from the corresponding bag of bulk sediment. The material collected in opaque tubes will be wet sieved at ~500 µm, after which the coarse fraction will be dried and returned to South Africa for sorting within a year of initial receipt at Royal Holloway, thereby minimising the loss of archaeological material. Sand-sized quartz and feldspar will be extracted from the finer (<500 µm) fraction via aggressive chemical treatment, which will result in the destruction of other components of this material. The sediment samples collected for geochemical analysis will first be inspected to ensure that they do not contain important archaeological material, and then crushed prior to measurement. The above procedures will be conducted at the Royal Holloway Luminescence Laboratory: