The dawn of archeomagnetic dating

The use of secular variation in Earth's magnetic field for dating purposes in archeology and volcanology began with the first developments in paleomagnetism. This paper traces the key contributions of Paul-Louis Mercanton, Pierre David, Bernard Brunhes, and Raymond Chevallier in the early 20th century, between the seminal works of Giuseppe Folgheraiter in the 1890s and Emile Thellier in the 1930s, all of whom expressed a strong interest in these applications. These researchers raised issues that are still at the forefront of present-day research, though archeomagnetists are now able to address them with modern tools and much larger sets of data. Surprisingly, in 1901, a first and long plea for the use of archeomagnetism as a dating tool came not from a paleomagnetist but from the limnologist Francois-Alphonse Forel.