UThwigl

The goal of UThwigl is to compute closed- and open-system uranium-thorium (U-Th) ages of geological and archaeological samples. Closed-system U-Th dating follows the principles presented in Edwards et al. (2003), Richards and Dorale (2003) and Ludwig (2003). Open-system U-Th dating is based on the diffusion-adsorption-decay (DAD) model of Sambridge et al. (2012), which allows for advective and diffusive transport of uranium and thorium isotopes, while including synchronous radioactive decay.

The function, csUTh(), calculates closed-system ages and uses ²³⁰Th/²³⁸U and ²³⁴U/²³⁸U activity ratios on a single analysis to return an age in thousands of years ago. The ²³²Th/²³⁸U or ²³⁰Th/²³²Th activity ratios are also needed for detrital correction.

The function, osUTh(), calculates open-system ages and take the ²³⁰Th/²³⁸U and ²³⁴U/²³⁸U activity ratios collected along a transect perpendicular to the surface of the tooth or bone and return an age in thousands of years ago.

Please see the vignette for an example of how to use the functions in this package.

Web application

The package includes two web applications: one that runs osUTh() in your browser where you can upload your CSV file, set the model parameters, run the model, and view the results, and a second app that does the same for csUTh(). Choose this option is you are not familiar with R. Here’s a screenshot of the web app:

Run code without downloading anything

You can run the package functions in your browser by starting a binder instance. This will open RStudio in your browser, together with the contents of this GitHub repository.

Installing the UThwigl package on your computer

To install the development version of UThwigl from GitHub on your computer, run:

if(!require("remotes")) install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("tonydoss/UThwigl")