We studied the detrital remanent magnetization of laboratory redeposited lake sediments, previously shown to be excellent recorders of the paleomagnetic field. The redeposited and original/natural sediments have indistinguishable stabilities to alternating fields (AF) demagnetization and remanence intensities, indicating that their remanences reside in the same magnetic particles. Thermomagnetic behavior, hysteresis parameters, and relatively high AF stabilities of the detrital and anhysteretic remanences are essentially identical throughout the sediment column, suggesting uniform distributions of submicron magnetite grains. The declination is accurately recorded, but inclination shallowing averaging 18¿ is observed for routinely hand-stirred, rapidly redeposited sediments. However, sonically disagregated sediments settle more slowly with anomalous shallowing averaging 7¿, decreasing upward in the redeposited column. These results indicate that thorough disaggregation of the sediment reduces the magnitude of the inclination shallowing probably by more efficiently isolating the magnetic grains from the matrix, thus diminishing the dominance of the gravitational over geomagnetic aligning torques during deposition. The progressive decrease of the inclination shallowing upward in the sediment column might be due to a parallel upward increase in the fraction of isolated magnetic particles, which undergo Brownian motion and alignment by the geomagnetic field. The dominance of gravitational over geomagnetic aligning torques during deposition might be a cause for inclination shallowing in some coarser sediments. In contrast, inclination shallowing would be minimized for slow deposition of isolated submicron magnetite grains during natural sedimentation. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1990