ELi5 How can you find out how old an artifact is?
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There are many different methods, and typically more than one method is used.
Style and site history is probably the easiest one. If you know that a certain site was inhabited in a certain date range (for example from historical records) you can be reasonably certain that objects found there date to around that period. Different cultures use different styles of ornamentation and form, so it’s a reasonably good guess that artifacts with a certain style and form come from that culture and you might know when that culture is thought to have inhabited the area the site is in. You can be reasonably sure, for example, that artifacts with a Norse ornamentation found in England date to the viking age.
Stratigraphy can also be used to relatively date objects. Older stuff is found below newer stuff, so objects found in layers underground deeper than stuff from a certain era must be older than that. Probably.
Organic materials can also be dated using a technique called radio-carbon dating. Radioactive carbon-14 in the atmosphere gets absorbed by all living things via the food chain, but begins to break down radioactively over a very long time. Dead plants and animals no longer replenish with new carbon. So, if you know the typical carbon-14 concentration of living things, you measure the difference in carbon-14 in really old dead stuff to get an estimate on how long ago that thing died. This can be used to estimate the age of anything made of plants or animal parts, but not ceramics or stone tools.
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