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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]
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.
In December 2010, Timothy Jull, a member of the original 1988 radiocarbon-dating team and editor of the peer-reviewed journal Radiocarbon, coauthored an article in that journal with Rachel A. Freer-Waters. They examined a portion of the radiocarbon sample that was left over from the section used by the University of Arizona in 1988 for the ...
Samples used for radiocarbon dating must be handled carefully to avoid contamination. Not all material can be dated by this method; only samples containing organic matter can be tested: the date found will be the date of death of the plants or animals from which the sample originally came.