1998A&A...339..385W

B, V-CCD photometry has been obtained for stars in two fields in the NE part of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and photographic photometry, and a calibrating CCD sequence, for a third field. The colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) and luminosity functions (LFs) for main sequence (MS) and red giant (RG) stars in the fields are established. The red giant clumps (RGCs) are found to be bimodal and to contain stars from one old population, ≥10Gyr, and one younger, ≥0.3-4Gyr old. Analyses of published data for a number of LMC fields reveal similar compositions of their RGCs. These epochs of star formation are common to most of the studied LMC fields; only those in or close to now active star-forming regions contain a considerably younger population. Comparisons with recent HST results for main-sequence stars permit the identification of star formation events ∼1 and 2Gyr ago. The data are used to estimate the masses of Population II and the intermediate-age Population I to ∼2 and 7.5x10⁸M_☉, respectively, meaning that the burst(s) of star formation which occurred between 4 and 0.3Gyr ago were about 3 to 4 times as productive as the original star production in the LMC.