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Archaeology enters the ‘atomic age’: a short history of radiocarbon, 1946–1960

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2020

EMILY M. KERN
EMILY M. KERN*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Sydney2052, NSW, Australia. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Today, the most powerful research technique available for assigning chronometric age to human cultural objects is radiocarbon dating. Developed in the United States in the late 1940s by an alumnus of the Manhattan Project, radiocarbon dating measures the decay of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 (C14) in organic material, and calculates the time elapsed since the materials were removed from the life cycle. This paper traces the interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeology and radiochemistry that led to the successful development of radiocarbon dating in the early 1950s, following the movement of people and ideas from Willard Libby's Chicago radiocarbon laboratory to museums, universities and government labs in the United States, Australia, Denmark and New Zealand. I show how radiocarbon research built on existing technologies and networks in atomic chemistry and physics but was deeply shaped by its original private philanthropic funders and archaeologist users, and ultimately remained to the side of many contemporaneous Cold War scientific and military projects.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 207 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2020

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Footnotes

Warmest thanks to Charlotte Sleigh, Amanda Rees and the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions on improving this manuscript; to Erika Lorraine Milam, Michael Gordin, Andrew Edwards and Wangui Muigai for their insightful comments on earlier drafts; and to Suzanne Gould (AAUW), Robin Perry (UNSW) and the staff of the UCLA Library and Special Collections for their invaluable archival assistance.

References

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2 In equation form: 14N + neutron → 14C + proton.

3 Libby, op. cit. (1).

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10 Ziegler and Jacobson, op. cit. (9).

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20 Recent (2018) experimental data gives the half-life of carbon-14 as 5,730 years.

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26 Lindee and Radin, op. cit. (14).

27 See Lindee and Radin, op. cit. (14). See also Luciak, Ilja A., ‘Vision and reality: Axel Wenner-Gren, Paul Fejos, and the origins of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research’, Current Anthropology (2016) 57, pp. S302–S332CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Aiello, Leslie C., ‘The Wenner-Gren Foundation: supporting anthropology for 75 years’, Current Anthropology (2016) 57, pp. S211–S217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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29 Lindee and Radin, op. cit. (14), p. S242.

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31 Marlowe, op. cit. (4), p. 19; Lindee and Radin, op. cit. (14), p. S270.

32 Frederick Johnson to Paul Fejos, 22 December 1947, FJ 1:N1.

33 See Frederick Johnson to Donald Collier, 16 February 1948, FJ 1:N1; and Johnson, Frederick (ed.), ‘Radiocarbon dating: a report on the program to aid in the development of the method of dating’, Memoirs of the Society for American Archaeology (1951) 8, pp. 1–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Libby, Willard F., Radiocarbon Dating, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952Google Scholar; and Fejos, Paul, The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research: The First Ten Years 1941–1951 as the Viking Fund, New York: The Viking Fund, 1951, pp. 22–24Google Scholar. Yale geologist Richard Foster Flint also assisted the committee and served as a liaison to the American Geological Society.

34 W.F. Libby to Frederick Johnson, 24 March 1948; W.F. Libby to Froelich Rainey, 9 April 1948; and Johnson to Libby, 19 April 1948, all in FJ 1:1.

35 W.F. Libby to Paul Fejos, 13 December 1948, FJ 1:1.

36 Libby to Fejos, 13 December 1948; Johnson to Rainey and Collier, 10 December 1948, FJ 1:2; Rainey to Fejos, 27 January 1949, FJ 1:2; Libby to Fejos, 13 December 1948, FJ 1:1; Johnson to Libby, 28 January 1949, FJ 1:1; Johnson to Fejos, 3 January 1949, FJ 1; Fejos to Johnson, 11 January 1949, FJ 1.

37 Libby to Johnson, 14 October 1948, FJ 1:1.

38 Johnson to Fejos, 3 May 1949, FJ 1.

39 James B. Griffin to Johnson, 21 May 1949, FJ 1.

40 Johnson to Libby, 8 April 1949, FJ 1:1.

41 Edward Deevey to Harry Godwin, 17 October 1949, FJ 1; Hallam Movius to Johnson, 18 October 1949, FJ 1.

42 Libby to Johnson, 9 October 1951, FJ 2.

43 Johnson to Libby, 11 October 1951, FJ 2.

44 Frederick Johnson, Froelich Rainey, Donald Collier and Richard F. Flint, ‘Radiocarbon dating: a summary’, in Johnson, ‘Radiocarbon dating’, op. cit. (33), p. 62.

45 Collier to Johnson, 10 June 1949, FJ 1:2, emphasis in the original.

46 See memorandum from Richard Foster Flint, 25 May 1950, FJ 1:2; Johnson to Libby, 31 May 1950, and Libby to Johnson, 7 June 1950, FJ 1:1.

47 Frederick Johnson, ‘Present status of carbon 14 research’, paper read at the Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting, Norman, Oklahoma, 20 May 1950, FJ 2.

48 Johnson to Jesse Jennings, 15 December 1950, FJ 1:3.

49 Johnson to Jennings, 18 April 1951, FJ 1:3.

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62 On Geiger-Müller counters see discussion in Galison, op. cit. (11), Chapter 6.

63 Galison, op. cit. (11), p. 35. The parts list comes from the records of the Department of Nuclear and Radiation Chemistry, University of New South Wales, Sydney. See J.H. Green to Vice-Chancellor J.P. Baxter, 13 October 1959, Department of Nuclear and Radiation Chemistry papers, UNSW Records and Archives, Sydney. Unfortunately, Libby's description of his apparatus does not go into equivalent detail about the suppliers and exact makes and models of his electronic equipment.

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68 HL fellowship report 1, 30 November 1947.

69 HL fellowship report 2, 5 September 1948.

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72 Johnson to James Arnold, 14 October 1955, FJ 4.

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82 Trinity (July 1945), Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 1945), and the two test detonations Able (June 1946) and Baker (July 1946) during Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll.

83 Alex Wellerstein, ‘What if Truman hadn't ordered the H-bomb crash program?’, Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog, 18 June 2012, at http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/06/18/what-if-truman-didnt-order-h-bomb-crash-program.

84 Rafter and Fergusson, op. cit. (12).

85 The British atomic tests in Australia at Emu Field, Maralinga and the Montebello Islands in the early 1950s were obviously in the southern hemisphere, but conducted under circumstances of extreme secrecy.

86 See discussion in Priestley, op. cit. (78); Galbreath, op. cit. (78).

87 Herran, op. cit. (16).

88 Hans E. Suess, ‘Radiocarbon concentration in modern wood’, Science (1955) 122, pp. 415–417.

89 Rafter and Fergusson, op. cit. (12).

90 Westgren, op. cit. (8).

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