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Lake Mungo, presently a dry lake in the semi-arid zone of southeastern Australia, preserves a unique record of human settlement and past environmental change within the transverse lunette that built up on its downwind margin. The lunette is >30 km long and the variable morphology along its length suggests spatial variability in deposition over time. Consequently this presents differential potential for the preservation of past activity traces of different ages along the lunette. Earlier work at Lake Mungo focused primarily on the southern section of the lunette, where two ritual burials of considerable antiquity were found. Here we describe the depositional history of the central section of the Lake Mungo lunette, together with the first single grain optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) chronology of the full stratigraphic sequence and of three hearths. We thereby lay the foundation for systematic investigation of the …