New radiometric ages for the Early Upper Palaeolithic type locality of Brno-Bohunice (Czech Republic): comparison of OSL, IRSL, TL and 14 C dating results D. Richter a, * , G. Tostevin b , P. S ˇ krdla c , W. Davies d a Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Human Evolution, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany b Department of Anthropology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA c Institute of Archaeology, Brno, Czech Republic d Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, United Kingdom article info Article history: Received 22 August 2008 Received in revised form 22 October 2008 Accepted 24 October 2008 Keywords: Early Upper Palaeolithic Bohunician Leaf points Middle Danube Central Europe OSL Radiocarbon Dating abstract New radiometric data are reported from the recent excavation of the type locality of the Early Upper Palaeolithic entity of the Bohunician. Recently obtained radiocarbon ( 14 C) data on charcoal are compared with new Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating of sediment. OSL ages were determined on sediment from the archaeological occupation at Brno-Bohunice, as well as from the over- and underlying loessic sediments. Multiple techniques were applied, which all gave congruent results. While a dual protocol (post IR-OSL) failed the quality criteria tests, ages were obtained by Multiple-Aliquot-Additive- Dose (MAAD) on polymineral material and Single-Aliquot-Regeneration (SAR) on fine grain quartz extract as well as on polymineral material. Fading tests show significant loss of Infrared Stimulated Luminescence (IRSL) after storage for 3 and 12 months for one sample, but little or no fading for others. The resulting (uncorrected) age estimates are smaller than those on quartz by OSL methods. The latter are considered to be more reliable estimates of the sedimentation age of these deposits. The measured OSL doses do not show a simple distribution and the lowest 5% was used for age calculation to represent the most likely sedimentation age. The quartz from the loess overlying the archaeological layer is OSL dated to 30.9  3.1 ka, while the sediment for the paleosol which contains the archaeological layer gave an age of 58.7  5.8 ka. The attribution of this paleosol to the Hengelo interstadial is therefore ques- tionable. However, if the Hengelo interstadial is correlated with the Dansgaard/Oeschger (D/O) event 12, statistical agreement within 2-s is achieved. The OSL result for the archaeological layer is in accordance with a weighted average TL date on heated flint artifacts of 48.2  1.9 ka from this layer as well as calibrated radiocarbon data (CalPal Hulu 2007) from nearby locations. However, radiocarbon data on charcoal samples obtained during excavation at Brno-Bohunice 2002 provide age estimates between 30 and 40 ka 14 C-years, which translate to approximately (33) 35–44 ka on the calendric time scale according to the Hulu 2007 model. For the underlying loess a depositional age of 104.3  10.6 ka was obtained by OSL. The presented OSL ages indicate that a simple correlation of soil sequences between sites within a region has to be verified by chronometric dating. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Any understanding of the evolutionary significance of the cultural ‘transition’ from the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic or the biological change from archaic to modern hominins requires an improvement in the chronological resolution of Early Upper Palaeolithic archaeological entities across Eurasia in Oxygen Isotope Stage 3 (see e.g. Zilha ˜o and d’Errico, 2003; Jo ¨ris and Adler, 2008; Roebroeks, 2008). The present paper reports on a dating project involving OSL, IRSL, and 14 C methods, combined with published TL dating results (Richter et al., 2008), designed to refine the chronological position of the Bohunician, a distinctive Early Upper Palaeolithic entity of Central Europe, at the type locality of Brno-Bohunice, Czech Republic. The presentation of these results also represents an opportunity to discuss which 14 C age determi- nations made for various localities on the Red Hill (  Cerven y Kopec) of Bohunice over the last thirty years have relevance to the archaeological entity known as the Bohunician. Uncalibrated radiocarbon data are here referred to in 14 C-years because of their lack of dimension and BP is not added because of the implicit * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ49 341 3550354. E-mail address: drichter@eva.mpg.de (D. Richter). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Archaeological Science journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jas 0305-4403/$ – see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2008.10.017 Journal of Archaeological Science 36 (2009) 708–720