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Late Quaternary Speleogenesis And Landscape Evolution In A Tropical Carbonate Island: Pango La Kuumbi (Kuumbi Cave), Zanzibar, Nikos Kourampas, Ceri Shipton, William Mills, Ruth Tibesasa, Henrietta Horton, Mark Horton, Mary Prendergast, Alison Crowther, Katerina Douka, Patrick Faulkner, Llorenç Picornell, Nicole Boivin

International Journal of Speleology

Kuumbi Cave is one of a group of caves that underlie a flight of marine terraces in Pleistocene limestone in eastern Zanzibar (Indian Ocean). Drawing on the findings of geoarchaeological field survey and archaeological excavation, we discuss the formation and evolution of Kuumbi Cave and its wider littoral landscape. In the later part of the Quaternary (last ca. 250,000 years?), speleogenesis and terrace formation were driven by the interplay between glacioeustatic sea level change and crustal uplift at rates of ca. 0.10-0.20 mm/yr. Two units of backreef/reef limestone were deposited during ‘optimal’ (highest) highstands, tentatively correlated with MIS 7 and …

The 19th Century Excavation Of Kent's Cavern, England, Donald A. Mcfarlane, Joyce Lundberg

WM Keck Science Faculty Papers

Between 1858 and 1880, William Pengelly developed revolutionary new techniques for the archeological and paleontological excavation of cave deposits. His work at Brixham Cave and Kent’s Cavern, England, yielded tens of thousands of specimens from the mid-Pleistocene to the Holocene, settled the intellectual debate over the co-existence of humans and extinct mammals, and accumulated an unparalleled resource for continued study. Although the Brixham Cave work was thoroughly summarized in print, Pengelly never published the plans of his much more thorough and extensive excavations at Kent’s Cavern. Here we present a reconstructed plan of the Pengelly excavations that we hope will …

Age Determination Of Recent Cave Deposits Using Excess 210Pb - A New Technique, M. Baskaran, Thomas M. Iliffe

Environmental Science and Geology Faculty Research Publications

Cave deposits have been widely used as proxy recorders in deciphering palaeoclimate during the last glacial/interglacial maxima (∼ 120 ka) [Harmon et al., 1975; Atkinson et al., 1978; Goede and Harmon, 1983; Ayliffe and Veeh, 1989]. Palaeoclimatic studies of cave deposits for the past 1–1000 yr time scale require a precise dating technique, that until now has been lacking. Due to the multiple sources of carbon in speleothems, ¹⁴C dates obtained for recently deposited calcite are highly variable and thus, ¹⁴C dating techniques are not suitable to obtain speleothem ages for the past 1–1000 years.

Here, we show …