Full‐Vector Archaeomagnetic Dating of a Medieval Limekiln at Pinilla Del Valle Site (Madrid, Spain)

Abstract

Archaeomagnetic dating based on the full geomagnetic field vector was carried out on a limekiln excavated at Pinilla del Valle archaeological site (Madrid, Spain). The limekiln tradition in this area is largely documented by historical sources for recent centuries but the date of the studied kiln's last use was unknown. The combination of mean archaeomagnetic directional and absolute archaeointensity results shows that the kiln was last used between AD 1296 and 1413, in good agreement with two independent radiocarbon dates. This study provides the first archaeomagnetic evidence that the local limekiln tradition dates back to at least late medieval times. Furthermore, the inclusion of these data in the Iberian secular variation curve and geomagnetic field models will help to improve the archaeomagnetic dating technique.

Refining Holocene geochronologies using palaeomagnetic records

“…(2013) gave two potential time intervals and hence larger uncertainty than the TL dating. A more conclusive application of the method was using full vector magnetic results from two kilns in Greece (Tema et al, 2015 -Chakrouni et al, 2013;Casas et al, 2018) or burnt cave sediments from the Bronze age in Spain (Carrancho et al, 2017).…”

“…In some countries, e.g., the UK, archaeomagnetic dating curves have been used by governmental heritage agencies as part of the procedure of age refinement for artefacts (see, Batt et al, 2017). Some recent applications have been to refine the ages of archaeological structures (e.g., Carrancho et al, 2017;Hammond et al, 2017;Principe et al, 2018), to place age constraints on human activities (Peters et al, 2018), habitation of peoples in certain areas, e.g., through investigation of burial contexts (Goguitchaichvili et al, 2017b), and cultural practices (Goguitchaichvili et al, 2017a).…”

Recent Advances in Chinese Archeomagnetism

“…Archeomagnetism contributes greatly to recovering the secular variation of the geomagnetic field during the Holocene, which has applications for exploring the geodynamo in Earth's interior (Tarduno et al, 2015;Terra-Nova et al, 2016;Davies and Constable, 2017) and establishing various global models [e.g., the CALS series Constable et al, 2016), ARCH3k.1 (Korte et al, 2009), ARCH10k.1 (Constable et al, 2016), pfm9k (Nilsson et al, 2014), and SHA.DIF.14k (Pavón-Carrasco et al, 2014)]. Archeomagnetic studies can also be used to solve archeological issues, such as dating an artifact by comparing its recorded geomagnetic intensity and/or direction to a local geomagnetic reference curve (Aitken, 1990;Pavón-Carrasco et al, 2011;Carrancho et al, 2017;Peters et al, 2017), or testing the synchronicity of archeological units by comparing the geomagnetic information extracted from them (Carrancho et al, 2016). Archeomagnetic studies even have potential applications for exploring the relationship between positions of virtual geomagnetic poles and historical records of aurorae (Liritzis, 1988).…”