Development of single grain OSL dating of ceramic materials: Spatially resolved measurement of absorbed dose

The feasibility of using an OSL scanning technique to determine the cumulative absorbed dose for single inclusions in sliced brick samples is explored in this paper. The OSL scanner was configured to provide optical stimulation using laser sources with either blue/green or near-IR wavelengths. A regenerative OSL procedure was successfully applied to determine the palaeodose for single grains of quartz in the surface of the ceramic slices ranging in diameter from ∼60∼60 to ∼750μm. The results obtained compare well with calculated values of palaeodose obtained by scaling the measured values of palaeodose obtained using a single aliquot regenerative procedure with disaggregated quartz inclusions extracted from the same brick and prepared using the conventional inclusion technique.