Wednesday, May 13, 2020

New Method for Dating Pottery

From Phys.org:
Archaeological pottery has been used to date for more than a century, and from the Roman period onwards can offer quite precise dating. But further back in time, for example at the prehistoric sites of the earliest Neolithic farmers, accurate dating becomes more difficult because the kinds of pottery are often less distinctive and there are no coins or historical records to give context.
This is where radiocarbon dating, also known as 14C-dating, comes to the rescue. Until now, archaeologists had to radiocarbon date bones or other organic materials buried with the pots to understand their age. But the best and most accurate way to date pots would be to date them directly, which the University of Bristol team has now introduced by dating the left behind from food preparation.
Professor Richard Evershed from the University of Bristol's School of Chemistry led the team. He said: "Being able to directly date archaeological pots is one of the "Holy Grails" of archaeology. This new method is based on an idea I had going back more than 20 years and it is now allowing the community to better understand key archaeological sites across the world.
"We made several earlier attempts to get the method right, but it wasn't until we established our own radiocarbon facility in Bristol that we cracked it. There's a particular beauty in the way these new technologies came together to make this important work possible and now archaeological questions that are currently very difficult to resolve could be answered." (Read more.)
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