ESR chronology of the Somme River Terrace system and first human settlements in Northern France |
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Authors: | Jean-Jacques Bahain, Christophe Falgu res, Michel Laurent, Pierre Voinchet, Jean-Michel Dolo, Pierre Antoine,Alain Tuffreau |
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Affiliation: | aDépartement de Préhistoire du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, UMR 5198 du CNRS, 1 rue René Panhard, 75013 Paris, France bLaboratoire National Henri Becquerel, CEA/Saclay, 91191Gif-sur-Yvette, France cLaboratoire de Géographie Physique, UMR 8591 du CNRS, 1 Place Aristide Briand, 92195 Meudon cedex, France dLaboratoire ‘Préhistoire et Quaternaire’, UMR 8018 du CNRS, Université de Lille 1, 59655 Villeneuve d’Ascq, France |
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Abstract: | The Somme Valley, Northern France, is famous for its archaeological sequence, where numerous rich Palaeolithic sites, such as Saint-Acheul, the type site of the Acheulian, have been discovered. The archaeological levels are often directly associated with fossil alluvial sediments of the River Somme or with slope deposits, including loess and palaeosols. In the middle reaches of the valley, near Amiens, the system of fossil-stepped fluvial terraces is particularly well developed and preserved, and occurs on 10 alluvial formations. These terraces, from +5 to +55 m above the present-day valley bedrock, allow the study of the environmental changes and the human settlement of this area through the Pleistocene. Since 1988, ESR dating was systematically applied on bleached quartz extracted from the fossil fluvial deposits, in order to better describe the geological evolution of the stepped system. More recently, U-series/ESR dating has also been performed on teeth collected from the different terrace deposits. Here we present a synthetic review of the main ESR results, and propose an ESR chronology for the geological evolution of the Somme fluvial system and for the Middle Pleistocene human settlement of northern France. |
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Keywords: | Somme Valley Stepped terrace system ESR dating Fluvial sediments Teeth Palaeolithic |
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