Absolute Dating of Desert Varnish Using Portable X-Ray Fluorescence: Calibration and Testing

Desert varnish, also called rock varnish, is a thin biogenic layer of Mn-oxides, Fe-oxides, and clays that coats rock surfaces in arid and semi-arid regions. The mass of these metals in the varnish registers cumulative biologic activity over time and presents a possible dating mechanism, subject to appropriate assumptions and restrictions. We have used a portable x-ray fluorescence (PXRF) unit to measure Mn and Fe in numerous desert varnishes, both in the field and laboratory; the anticipated relationship between age and mass emerges from these data. Our attempts to refine the PXRF technique for absolute dating of desert varnish are confounded by the limited number of "dated" varnishes available to calibrate and test the method. Although there is no current method to directly ascertain the age of desert varnish, our search for "dated" varnishes has yielded three suitable types of test materials: (1) The ages of young basalt flows dated by various K/Ar radiometric techniques represent the maximum age of varnish developed on those surfaces. Such rocks are useful in the time range of perhaps 250,000 to 10,000 years; surface spalling with loss of varnish presents an upper time limit and difficulty in dating Holocene basalts presents a lower limit. Basalt flows typically provide horizontal surfaces that are ideal for PXRF measurements because, as a biogenic process, varnish development even at a single site varies with solar orientation. (2) Petroglyphs are the rock art that native peoples produced by pecking away varnish to expose fresh rock. This process restarts varnish development and the pecked surface gradually repatinates over time. At some locales, certain figures, symbols, and stylistic elements can be associated with an archaeological culture of known antiquity and duration, thus providing an age range for such glyphs. In the desert Southwest and Great Basin of the United States, appropriate glyphs are known from the present to at least 7000 years BP. Many of these petroglyphs are developed on vertical surfaces, which complicates dating both within and between sites. (3) The ages of the development of a number of geomorphic surfaces have been constrained by stratigraphic correlation and by dating of basalts, Pleistocene lake shorelines, and organic material. Such ages may in turn be associated with the initial exposure of fresh surfaces on cobbles and boulders on these geomorphic surfaces. We have compared the Mn and Fe accumulation in desert varnish from a variety of sites where the age of the fresh surface is constrained by one of the three approaches described above. Results thus far suggest that the current PXRF technique can provide absolute ages useful in situations where a significant uncertainty range is tolerable. Obvious sources of error in calibration and deployment of the PXRF technique that need to be addressed include errors in the dates of materials in the training sets, time lag between exposure of rock surface and varnish development, variations in surface orientation and micro-climate, and climate change over the course of varnish development.