Different ways of dating artifacts

Post a Comment. Friday, March 25, Archaeological Dating Techniques. We are in the final stages of processing the Fort Hunter collection and have begun to inventory the artifacts. This is all done in a systematic manner so that any given artifact can be easily accessed and utilized by future researchers.

Chronometric dating has revolutionized archaeology by allowing highly accurate dating of historic artifacts and materials with a range of scientific techniques. Chronometric dating, also known as chronometry or absolute dating, is any archaeological dating method that gives a result in calendar years before the present time. Archaeologists and scientists use absolute dating methods on samples ranging from prehistoric fossils to artifacts from relatively recent history. Chronometric techniques include radiometric dating and radio-carbon dating, which both determine the age of materials through the decay of their radioactive elements; dendrochronology, which dates events and environmental conditions by studying tree growth rings; fluorine testing, which dates bones by calculating their fluorine content; pollen analysis, which identifies the number and type of pollen in a sample to place it in the correct historical period; and thermoluminescence, which dates ceramic materials by measuring their stored energy. Scientists first developed absolute dating techniques at the end of the 19th century. Before this, archaeologists and scientists relied on deductive dating methods, such as comparing rock strata formations in different regions. Chronometric dating has advanced since the s, allowing far more accurate dating of specimens.

These artifacts and ecofacts helped archeologists date the early nineteenth-century Hooe Dependency Site at Manassas National Battlefield Park. Matthew Reeves,University of Maryland. Archeology is a chronicle of past cultures through the centuries and millennia. The concept of time varies among world cultures. Westerners think of time in linear terms, extending back over more than 2.

Archaeologists use many different techniques to determine the age of a particular artifact, site, or part of a site. Two broad categories of dating or chronometric techniques that archaeologists use are called relative and absolute dating. Stratigraphy is the oldest of the relative dating methods that archaeologists use to date things. Stratigraphy is based on the law of superposition--like a layer cake, the lowest layers must have been formed first. In other words, artifacts found in the upper layers of a site will have been deposited more recently than those found in the lower layers.