Dating of tiles and pottery shards from seljuk summer palace Kubad Abad (Konya-Turkey) using thermoluminescence

Using the thermoluminescence (TL) dating technique we have obtained the ages for sixteen ancient Islamic tiles and pottery shards excavated out from Kubad Abad, an archaeological Medieval Islamic period palace on the southwest shore of lake Beysehir, west of Konya. Although it was attributed to Sultan Alaeddin Keykubad, first half of the 13 century [1] no inscription stating the construction date of Kubad Abad was found. Kubad Abad complex has produced glazed and unglazed tiles and pottery shards; thus our new TL chronology for these samples can be used to revise the present expectations for the tile and pottery chronologies. The present paper will also describe the methodology of TL measurements and some dose measurements required for the calculation of the annual dose. We have obtained the Seljuk period ages, as mean values, for the tiles: AD 1329 and AD 1324, and for some of the pottery shards: AD 1350 and AD 1245 from the Kubad Abad palace complex by using regeneration and additive dose methods, respectively. The rest of the pottery shards from the same palace complex have revealed the three groups of mean ages, belonged to different periods: AD 774 (The Early Byzantine Period), 390 BC (The beginning of the Roman Age), 2653 BC (The Early Bronze Age). The measured TL ages and the consistency of the results with the expectations for the ancient site are discussed.