Propuesta metodológica para la caracterización de la mineralogía magnética en estudios paleoambientales. Aplicación al yacimiento de Atapuerca

Abstract

A methodology is proposed, which gives information about the contents of ferrimagnetic and antiferromagnetic minerals with different domain structure in soils and sediments. Isothermal remanent magnetisation (IRM) acquired and measured both at room temperature and at low temperature (77K) provides data which define a set of new parameters: AIRMlc provides information about the fraction of superparamagnetic ferrimagnetics in the studied samples; parameters C and g, respectively, inform about absolute and relative contents of goethite, and parameters B and b discern the fraction of goethite, in superparamagnetic state. The proposed methodology is applied to the study of cave sediments from the palaeo-anthropological site of Atapuerca