Ultrafast Component Effects on Quartz Single Grains Dose Estimation from Khutagt Uul Mountains, Mongolia

This study presents single-grain optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) results from pottery and sediments from the archaeological site “The burials in Khutag Uul Mountains (Mongolia)”. A global fitting procedure was used on a selection of single grains from pottery, D₀ values obtained were between 16 to 40 Gy and 25 to 82 Gy and the equivalent doses D_e ranged from ∼8 to 12 Gy and from 4.2 ± 0.4 Gy to 37.3 ± 2.5 Gy for pottery and sedimentary quartz, correspondingly.

For pottery, the relative spread in CAM D_e values increases as higher precision constraints are applied and lead to significant increases in the relative standard error from 2.7% to ∼7.5%. The number of accepted grains which passed acceptance criteria reduced from 180 to 65. For sedimentary quartz, there is a trend observed that both MAM D_e and FMM D_e values increase as higher precision in D_e is applied, and the number of accepted grains reduces from 146 to 53.

The detailed study of the OSL decay curves identified an ultrafast OSL component with the decay rates of 53 ± 1 s⁻¹ in addition to the fast and medium components and its effect on D_e was examined.