14C Ages of Terrestrial Macrofossils from Lago Grande di Monticchio (Italy)

Abstract

Lago Grande di Monticchio (Italy) contains long sedimentary records of >75 ka (Zolitschka and Negendank 1996). In a joint European project (Creer and Thouveny 1996), vegetation history and climatic changes for this part of the Mediterranean have been reconstructed (Watts, Allen and Huntley 1996; Watts et al. 1996). In addition to the time scale based on annual laminations and sedimentation rate, tephra layers and pollen spectra, radiocarbon dating was applied for the last 40 ka. Previous studies have shown that the age of bulk sediment from Lago Grande di Monticchio, which is a maar lake at the flanks of Mt. Vulture, was influenced by "dead carbon" of volcanic origin dissolved in the lake water. Thus, 14C dating of the record is problematic and must be limited to dating macrofossils of terrestrial origin. From a set of sediment samples, macrofossils were selected and dated using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). A 14C time scale based on seven data points between 9000 and 24,000 BP is compared with other dating of the record based on varve counting and tephrochronology (Zolitschka 1996).