Radiocarbon Age Determination

Radiocarbon is only one of a number of techniques employed by archaeolo­gists and other researchers interested in the Quaternary. Radiocarbon provides an estimate of the age at death of the organism, but it   From Age is up to the archaeologist to relate this process to constructing a chronology    Estimates to of past human behavior. This process may seem simple but, as a number of Chronology authors have pointed out (e.g., Dean 1978; Ramcnofsky 1998), this simplicity is an illusion. Imagine, for instance, concentrations of charcoal derived from a hearth buried within a stratigraphic layer in a cave site such as those excavated at the front of the Bone Cave, one of a series of rockshelter sites excavated in Tasmania with age estimates ranging back to older than 30,000 BP (Allen 1996). These sites are important because they represent a Southern Hemisphere equivalent to the European Upper Paleolithic, and provide archaeologists with the opportunity to compare and contrast the archaeological records of modern humans who occupied glacial environments at opposite ends of the globe (e.g., Holdaway & Cosgrove 1997).

At Bone Cave, concentrations of charcoal were identified toward the front of the cave. Within the same layer are scattered a number of stone artifacts and bones from animals. Using a sample from the concentrations of charcoal, an archaeologist may obtain a radiocarbon determination to "date" hearth construction and, by extension, the stone artifacts and animal bones. In fact, use of the term date in contexts such as these has been much criticized, since the word implies a specific moment in time and, as discussed above, age estimates using radiogenic techniques such as radiocarbon return means and associated standard errors, not fixed dates (Coleman et al. 1987). The preferred term is age or age estimate, because these terms convey the uncertainty connected with age estimation while the term date does not.

Questionnaire:

• Explain more about the Radiocarbon technique in age determination?