Dating method by electron spin resonance at the 'Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle'. Twenty years of methodological researches and geochronological applications

The Electronic Spin Resonance (ESR) dating method has considerably evolved since its first uses in France at the early 1980's. The samples classically used until the middle part of the 1990's, carbonates and bones, were forsaken progressively and replaced by teeth and bleached quartz. Analytical progresses and methodological developments related to the study of these two materials have considerably increase on one hand the precision and the accuracy of the obtained results, allowing a comparison with those derived from other geochronological techniques, and on the other hand the chronological range of application of the ESR method. Even if the ESR method experiences still today many methodological developments, it has an undeniable geochronological potential and it is one of the rare methods permitting the direct dating of the Lower and Middle Pleistocene layers in non volcanic areas. Then its application is of a considerable importance for the study of the first human settlements of Eurasia and the possibility to date various types of materials carried out from the same archaeological level, jointly by ESR and different other geochronological techniques, by allowing a intercalibration of the results, offers in addition a tool to evaluate the reliability of the obtained ages. Some of the most significant results obtained at the Department of Prehistory of the National Museum of Natural History are evoked in this memory and illustrates both the potential and the current limits of this method. (author)