Event Title

OSL and Mound Dating: Exploring the Use of Optically Stimulated Luminescence Dating to Establish the Chronology of a Native American Burial Mound at the Kiwanis Site

Presenter Information

Marius Vold, Minnesota State University, MankatoFollow

Location

CSU 255

Start Date

12-4-2022 2:30 PM

End Date

12-4-2022 3:30 PM

Student's Major

Anthropology

Student's College

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Mentor's Name

Ronald Schirmer

Mentor's Department

Anthropology

Mentor's College

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Description

Currently, there are no good and legal ways to accurately date Native American burial mounds. This project aims to investigate whether it is possible to extract viable samples for Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating from burial mounds, using the Kiwanis site, in Eastern Wisconsin, to test out the method. Using OSL to date burial mounds has only been attempted a handful of times before, the previous attempts being met with limited success and degrees of uncertainty. This project differs in that it attempts to avoid the uncertainties in the previous work by using a different approach, using geophysical data to intentionally sample the floor of the mound, instead of the fill, and aims to extract core samples specifically intended for performing single-grain OSL dating, for a higher degree of accuracy. Using existing Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) data from a mound at the Kiwanis site, we hope to pinpoint where we can safely extract core samples from the floor of the mound, as opposed to testing the fill used in the mound’s construction, without encountering human remains, and make use of this information to attempt the extraction of core samples for later OSL dating.