Radiocarbon dating, right? How does that work, and how can we ensure its accuracy?
In: Planetary Science
It’s not the only technique. For example (and I apologise if I get the fine details slightly wrong), there’s a technique called luminescence dating that measures the energy of photons being released from crystals in soil samples, that can tell you when they were last exposed to sunlight, and give a time context to buried objects and artifacts. Tree rings, if you’re lucky enough to find wood, carry a record of good and bad growth years that can be correlated to other dated sites, say. Objects themselves may give information (if you find a roman coin with a known emperor’s head on it, it’s not been there longer than that emperor’s reign – and it’s often reasonable to deduce that things on top of it aren’t earlier than that emperor’s reign either, for example
And conversely, if you find something underneath something you can date, it’s often reasonable to assume that it’s no later than whatever is above it). I’m sure there are other things I’ve forgotten or plain don’t know about.
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