Establishing a timeline map for Cuicul archaeological Roman city by thermoluminescence dating
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Establishing a timeline map for Cuicul archaeological Roman city by thermoluminescence dating Lahcene Boudraa1,2,3 · Fayçal Kharfi1,2 · Mohamed Tewfik Sellami4 · Mesbah Bouhzem4 Received: 2 December 2019 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract In this work, a timeline map regarding the construction and the development of the archaeological Roman city Cuicul, Algeria, was established by thermoluminecence dating technique. The city was first subdivided into 10 main zones according to the observable architecture similarities and extensions. Already tested thermoluminescence dating procedure (Kharfi et al. in J Radioanal Nucl Chem 320:395–403, 2019) was used for the average age determination. The established timeline map fit well with the globally known history of the city and its development between the 1st and the 5th centuries except for the case of the great baths where an expectable date was determined (182 A.D.) which requires more studies. Keywords Cuicul · Terra-cotta brick · X-ray fluorescence · Thermoluminescence dating · Timeline map
Introduction Cuical is an ancient Roman city which was classified by the UNESCO as world heritage centre in 1982 [1, 2]. Cuicul, with its more than 500 years of history, is one of the most famous archaeological sites in Algeria. This Roman colony of veterans was founded on the site of an existing village already known as Cuicul. It was located in Numidia near the border with Mauretania Caesariensis. The first excavations at the site were undertaken in 1909 and the site has not revealed all these secrets so far as few scientific studies have been conducted on. In this work and after a successful thermoluminescence dating of a brick’s wall near the Caracalla arch [3], a big project was conducted, just after this first achievement, aiming the reconstruction of an accurate timeline map of the whole city by the same dating technique. This project was conducted in four (4) major phases: (1) Historical study on the site, (2) site subdivision and dated * Fayçal Kharfi [email protected] 1
Department of Physics, Ferhat Abbas-Setif1 University, Campus El‑Bèz, 19000 Sétif, Algeria
2
Laboratory of Dosing, Analysis and Characterization in High Resolution (DAC), Campus El‑Bèz, 19000 Sétif, Algeria
3
Nuclear Research Centre of Birine, 17200 Djelfa, Algeria
4
Djemila Archaeological Museum, 19000 Sétif, Algeria
terra-cotta bricks collection, (3) thermoluinescence dating, (4) data analysis and timeline map establishment. In the present work and in addition to thermolumienscence technique many others scientific techniques were used, such as X-ray fluorescence and γ-spectrometry, for the collection of requested dating data.
Theory The known history of the city The common and widely admitted hsitroy of Cuicul inform us that in 96 AD Emperor Nerva founded a Roman colony of veterans on the site of an existing village already known as Cuicul [4–6]. Cuicul is thus a Roman colony built and developed during approximately five centuries. The main buildings of Cuicul ar
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