Paleothermometry of NaCl as evidenced from thermoluminescence data

The firing temperature of ancient ceramic artifacts, i.e. the paleothermometry of these materials has been estimated by various techniques including thermoluminescence (TL) and, more recently, Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) where the OSL response of quartz to firing temperature is used. In this work we report the paleothermometry of sodium chloride (NaCl) by studying the TL response of the material as a function of annealing temperatures in the range of 100–500 °C. Annealing/measurement has been done in a commercial TL/OSL reader (Model No. Risø TL/OSL reader TL-DA-15) in a nitrogen atmosphere.Sodium chloride (NaCl) has been selected as the candidate to test the feasibility of the technique since in this system TL peaks are correlated with the thermal annealing of F-centers unlike the case of quartz where a one to one correlation with all the glow peaks and thermal annealing of defects has not been possible.