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Radiocarbon Dating: Methods
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The nonequlibrium approach attempts to apply this information to radiocarbon dating. But like the equilibrium method, it must still rely on certain assumptions. Robert Whitelaw’s (1970) version, for example, assumes that cosmic radiation and atomic decay have remained constant since the Creation. He proposes that the SDR has risen steadily since the Creation, and that the burial of almost all plants and animals in the Flood brought an initially high SPR down to current levels. Whitelaw ... sets the Creation at roughly 7,000 years ago, and the Flood at roughly 5,000 years ago. Table 1 shows the effect of his corrections on equilibrium ages.
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Radiocarbon, or Carbon-14, dating is probably one of the most widely used and best known absolute dating methods. It was developed by J. R. Arnold and W. F. Libby in 1949, and has become an indispensable part of the archaeologist's tool kit since. Its development revolutionized archaeology by providing a means of dating deposits independent of artifacts and local stratigraphic sequences. This allowed for the establishment of world-wide chronologies.
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Radiocarbon dating is a widely used method of obtaining absolute dates on organic material. Carbon C14 is a type of carbon that undergoes radioactive decay at a known rate. Read more about its formation here.
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The discovery of the radiocarbon dating method has given a much firmer base to archaeology and anthropology. For example, human settlers, such as the big-game hunting Clovis peoples of the American High Plains and the Southwest, first came to the Americas in substantial numbers at least 12,000 years ago. On the other hand, the magnificent color paintings of the Lascaux Cave in France are 16,000 years old, made 4,000 years before the first substantial number of human beings came to the Americas. By the end of the twentieth century, firm radiocarbon dates for human occupation of North America had never exceeded 12,000 years—the famous Kennewick Man, discovered in Oregon in 1996, was determined to be 9,300 years old—whereas in Europe and Asia Minor these dates reached back to the limits of the radiocarbon method and well beyond, according to other dating methods.
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The discovery of radiocarbon dating probably had a greater influence on modern archaeology than any other technological advance, especially on prehistoric periods where without written records archaeologists could previously only speculate the age of artefacts and sites. Before it was developed artefacts were dated largely by guesswork and assuming connections with other objects, the discovery of radiocarbon dating showed that many of these assumptions were wrong. Many radiocarbon results were so unexpected that archaeologists initially questioned the accuracy of the method... with time, its reliability was established.
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Nearly 60 years after the publication of the first radiocarbon ages, the radiocarbon dating method has become the key dating tool in archaeology. Recent years have brought new developments in radiocarbon dating, which are of great interest to archaeologists. Moreover, the growing number of archaeological excavations and the new research into landscape change has resulted in a significant increase of measured radiocarbon ages.
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