Abstract
In the last few years, substantial amount of archaeological remains, which belong to the Bronze and the Iron Ages, has been excavated in Jungdo, central part of Korean peninsula, indicating that the prehistoric (partly, early historic) cultures had been flourished in this area. Particularly, more than 150 dolmens were found during the excavation campaign, and they have drawn keen attentions because dolmens are controversially regarded as being the representative remains for the Bronze Age in Korean peninsula. Despite their archaeological importance for understanding the ancient cultural and social aspects in Korean peninsula, the chronology of the dolmens has largely been dependent upon sensory tests using concomitant artifacts while numerical dating has been scarce and limited to the case when organic materials for radiocarbon dating were available. Recent advances in luminescence dating, however, allow direct dating of stone structures, like dolmens, by measuring OSL (Optically Stimulated Luminescence) signals in phosphor minerals underneath the stone structures. In this paper, we performed OSL dating of quartz collected from underneath the stones making up dolmens in Jungdo. For OSL dating, we chose three dolmens and six sediment samples were collected from them. Using multiple grain aliquots, consisting of similar to 300 quartz grains, the OSL ages of similar to 4.3-3.2 ka were obtained. These ages, however, appear to be older than previously reported radiocarbon ages in Jungdo and a radiocarbon age (2119-1750 cal yr BP) of a human bone sample excavated from one of the dolmens. On the contrary, single grain OSL dating yielded MAM-3 (Minimum Age Model with three parameters) ages consistent with the radiocarbon age, ranging similar to 2.9-2.2 ka. Our results suggest that Jungdo has been the place either for burial plots or habitation of the ancient humans up to early Iron Age in the central part of Korean peninsula.