Quaternary aminostratigraphies for the eastern North European Plain.

The eastern North European Plain is an important area for studying Quaternary climate change and archaeology; however, providing chronological constraints for deposits can be challenging. Amino acid geochronology (AAG) is a relative dating technique that has been useful in correlating isolated Quaternary deposits. The intra-crystalline protein decomposition (IcPD) approach to AAG using the opercula of Bithynia snails has previously been used to provide relative dating frameworks across northern and central Europe in areas where the integrated diagenetic temperature can be assumed to be similar. Here, the first aminostratigraphies for the eastern North European Plain are presented, incorporating deposits from at least the last ~1 Ma, which are used to assess the current age attributions to Middle and Late Pleistocene interglacials. These aminostratigraphies are then used to explore expected differences in the extent of IcPD due to differing temperature histories across the study area. Correlations of opercula to regional pollen assemblages representative of the Holsteinian, Eemian and Holocene are used to evaluate the temporal resolution achievable by IcPD within a given interglacial. This work has produced four new aminostratigraphies that can now be used as reference datasets for relative age estimation for the late Middle Pleistocene to the Holocene in the eastern North European Plain.