Archaeological dating methods

Humans experience life through time. We have a good sense of the order in which things happened to us when we were children, students, adults , that is, a relative sequence of events. We can also handle parallel relative sequences e. But there will always be some external events to provide anchors to the relative chronology where we were when Kennedy was assassinated, or on 11 September , for example. Archaeology also depends on both relative and absolute dating.

The dating of remains is essential in archaeology, in order to place finds in correct relation to one another, and to understand what was present in the experience of any human being at a given time and place. Inscribed objects sometimes bear an explicit date, or preserve the name of a dated individual. In such cases, dating might seem easy. However, only a small number of objects are datable by inscriptions, and there are many specific problems with Egyptian chronology, so that even inscribed objects are rarely datable in absolute terms. In the archaeology of part-literate societies, dating may be said to operate on two levels: the absolute exactness found in political history or 'history event-by-event', and the less precise or relative chronology, as found in social and economic history, where life can be seen to change with less precision over time. The contrast might also be drawn between two 'dimensions', the historical, and the archaeological, corresponding roughly to the short-term and long-term history envisaged by Fernand Braudel. On the one level, events and individuals are placed in an absolute chronology: the exact years and sometimes even months and days of the events and biographies are known.

A methodology is described demonstrating the utility of the compound-specific 14C technique as a direct means of dating archaeological pottery. A protocol was developed and tested on n-alkanes and n-carboxylic acids possessing a broad range of 14C ages. Analytical blanks and controls allowed background 14C measurements to be assessed and potential sources of errors to be detected, i. The major advantage of the compound-specific technique is that 14C dates obtained for individual compounds can be directly linked to the commodities processed in the vessels during their use, e. The compound-specific 14C dating protocol was validated on a suite of ancient pottery whose predicted ages spanned a year date range.

When museums and collectors purchase archaeological items for their collections they enter an expensive and potentially deceptive commercial fine arts arena. Healthy profits are to be made from illicitly plundered ancient sites or selling skillfully made forgeries. Archaeology dating techniques can assure buyers that their item is not a fake by providing scientific reassurance of the artefact's likely age. Archaeological scientists have two primary ways of telling the age of artefacts and the sites from which they came: relative dating and absolute dating.