LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Radiocarbon Dating: Materials
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Most archaeologists have a working knowledge of radiocarbon dating. This knowledge is less common among museum curators, conservators and preservation scientists whose collections may not be defined as archaeological, but ... contain dateable materials. The National Science Foundation-University of Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (NFS-Arizona AMS) Laboratory is the premier center for archaeological radiocarbon dating in the United States, having performed measurements on the Shroud of Turin, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Vinland Map, the Gospel of Judas, and many documents in private collections. This talk will outline how radiocarbon dating is performed using AMS, including a discussion of how 14C measurements are translated into calendar dates. Conventional applications for dating museum objects will be presented, including the dating of papyrus and parchment documents. In addition, AMS can be used to detect 20th Century forgeries of art and artifacts purportedly created before 1955 based on the detection of atomic bomb-derived 14C, which can, in some cases, date objects at plus or minus one year's resolution.
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As long as there is organic material present, radiocarbon dating is a universal dating technique that can be applied anywhere in the world. It is good for dating for the last 50,000 years to about 400 years ago and can create chronologies for areas that previously lacked calendars. In 1949, American chemist Willard Libby, who worked on the development of the atomic bomb, published the first set of radiocarbon dates. His radiocarbon dating technique is the most important development in absolute dating in archaeology and remains the main tool for dating the past 50,000 years.
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Radiocarbon dating is the use of the naturally occurring isotope of carbon-14 in radiometric dating to determine the age of organic materials, up to ca. 50,000 years. Within archaeology it is considered an absolute dating technique.
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Richard Foster Flint, a professor of geology at Yale University and an expert on the Pleistocene epoch, was among the first to apply radiocarbon dating to glacial events. Collecting wood, bones and other organic material that had been covered over by the Laurentide Ice Sheet as it plowed across eastern and central North America, Flint collaborated with geophysicist Myer Rubin to demonstrate in 1955 that in most places the ice sheet achieved its greatest advance about 18,000 years ago, began to withdraw shortly thereafter and then hastened its retreat about 10,000 years ago.
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Table II lists all of the unpublished radiocarbon data for iron known by the authors. Most of the data is the authors’, but nine of the data points come from their predecessor, Richard Cresswell.23 Together, 29 new data points have been generated for iron-based materials that fall into two distinct categories: radiocarbon dates that matched the dates of presumed manufacture, and radiocarbon dates that did not match the dates of presumed manufacture. In only one case (the nose ring from Burkina Faso, Africa), the authors were not able to provide a simple explanation for the radiocarbon date obtained. All pertinent information is provided in Table II. Figure 1b summarizes all of the iron artifacts which have ever been ratified by radiocarbon dating.
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Radiocarbon Dating - Establishing the relative age of various materials with the use of carbon-14. This involves measuring the amount of 14C and of 12C and comparing the measured ratio to the one established by the production of 14C in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays. When an organism is alive the 14C/ 12C ratio in its biomass is constant (because of constant atmospheric 14C production,
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