Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Dating Methods
Dating Methods
Impor tance of str atig r aphy: main principles of super position and cutting
Typolog y of Nintendo
Cr oss-dating of ar tefacts
Pr ehistoric potter y
Radiocarbon r evolution
Willard Libby Invented 1949 Nobel Prize 1 950 = Present BP Calibration Standard Deviation AMS
Radiocarbon atoms
Carbon 14 decay
Half life ~ 5740 years
1 4
1 4
concentration
time
Detecting C-14
younger
C-14 limitations
21st century 19th century
age
older
20th century
C-14 dates were used to cross-date and correlate events previously dated using ancient calendars and astronomical dates C-14 was called into question it was discovered that a radiocarbon year does not match with a calendar year
Calibr ation
calibration was needed as a radiocarbon year does not match a calendar year dendrochronology was used to calibrate radiocarbon years with calendar years checkingC14 dates with known-date tree rings that physically grew in a particular year
objects of the Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom of Egypt yielded carbon dates that appeared roughly comparable with the historical dates
DENDROCHRONOLOGY
Dendr o samples
a master sequence for the same species of wood and the same region must exist, dating back from some fixed point
several floating chronologies have been established:
a sequence cannot be firmly tied in to a fixed point in time
e.g. classical Greece
reuse
most timber has been reused at some stage date of felling may not have been the same as the context in which it is found
Potassium (K)
potassium has one unstable and two stable isotopes potassium is the constituent of the most common minerals in igneous (volcanic) rocks
Ar gon (Ar)
a rare gas trapped in the crystal lattices when potassium decays to argon in rocks cooling from magma gases are freed, and the newly solid rock is theoretically devoid of argon this sets a radiometric clock since the time of cooling