Radiocarbon dating, right? How does that work, and how can we ensure its accuracy?
In: Planetary Science
There’s a couple of different ways.
Radiocarbon dating is probably the best.
When an organism is out in the environment, it’s constantly ingesting carbon. Some of thay carbon is carbon-14, a radio isotope. When the organism dies, it stops taking in new carbon and there is no way for new carbon-14 to be introduced. We know how much carbon-14 is naturally in the environment (which is constantly being made by cosmic rays hitting out atmosphere) so the now dead organism will slowly lose carbon-14 as it decays into nitrogen-14. By measuring how much carbon-14 is left relative to carbon-12, we can tell how long the organism has been dead (up to around 50,000 years, then there is too little carbon-14 left to measure.
We can apply this to ceramics by measuring the carbon thay was in the bacteria in the clay the ceramics were made from, and this tells us when the ceramics were fired.
There’s also other hints, like what we know about the area, dates of volcanic eruptions or drought years that match up with layers of soil we find these artifacts in, but radiocarbon dating works regardless of those factors
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