Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The development of radiocarbon dating has had a profound impact on archaeology. In addition to permitting more accurate dating within archaeological sites than previous methods, it allows comparison of dates of events across great distances. Histories of archaeology often refer to its impact as the "radiocarbon revolution".
Radiocarbon dating is a method used to determine the age of organic materials by measuring the decay of carbon-14 (14 C ), a radioactive isotope of carbon. Developed in the late 1940s, the technique has been widely used in archaeology , geology , and environmental science to date materials up to 50,000 years old.
Radiocarbon dating methods produce data based on the ratios of different carbon isotopes in a sample that must then be further manipulated in order to calculate a resulting "radiocarbon age". Radiocarbon dating is also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating. Calculations of radiocarbon dates are typically made based on measurements ...
The precision of a dating method depends in part on the half-life of the radioactive isotope involved. For instance, carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years. After an organism has been dead for 60,000 years, so little carbon-14 is left that accurate dating cannot be established.
Radiocarbon dating measurements produce ages in "radiocarbon years", which must be converted to calendar ages by a process called calibration. Calibration is needed because the atmospheric 14 C / 12 C ratio, which is a key element in calculating radiocarbon ages, has not been constant historically. [1]
Two common contaminants are humic acid, which can be removed with an alkali wash, and carbonates, which can be removed with an acid.These treatments can damage the structural integrity of the sample and remove significant volumes of material, so the exact treatment decided on will depend on the sample size and the amount of carbon needed for the chosen measurement technique.
Carbon dating the Dead Sea Scrolls refers to a series of radiocarbon dating tests performed on the Dead Sea Scrolls, first by the AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) lab of the Zurich Institute of Technology in 1991 and then by the AMS Facility at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1994–95.
It was discovered by and is named for the Austrian chemist Hans Suess, [2] who noted the influence of this effect on the accuracy of radiocarbon dating. More recently, the Suess effect has been used in studies of climate change. The term originally referred only to dilution of atmospheric 14 CO 2 relative to 12 CO 2.