Getting a grip on soil reworking - Single-grain feldspar luminescence as a novel tool to quantify soil reworking rates

Our results confirm the general suitability of feldspar post-IR IRSL as soil reworking tracer in terms of measurement performance, luminescence signal resetting and eventually the determination of soil reworking rate. We furthermore demonstrate that the feldspar based method is more time and labour efficient than quartz based methods, and we expect it to be more widely applicable. Most importantly, the method provides a reliable measures of the soil reworking intensity, which was not possible with quartz based methods. We conclude that feldspar single-grain luminescence analysis has the potential to become the method of choice for investigating soil reworking rates.