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The Radiocarbon Dating and Authentication of Iron Artifacts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

P T Craddock ,
M L Wayman  and
A J T Jull
P T Craddock
Affiliation:
Department of Scientific Research, The British Museum, London WC1B 3DG, United Kingdom.
M L Wayman
Affiliation:
Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton T6G 2G6, Canada.
A J T Jull
Affiliation:
NSF–Arizona AMS Laboratory, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85712-1201, USA.
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Abstract

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The continuing improvements in accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating technology mean that it is possible to work on ever smaller samples, which in turn, make an ever wider range of sample potentially available for dating. This paper discusses some of the difficulties arising with the interpretation of AMS dates obtained from carbon in iron. The overriding problem is that the carbon, now in chemical combination with the iron, could have come from a variety of sources with very different origins. These are now potentially an iressolvable mixture in the iron. For iron made over the last millennium, there are the additional problems associated with the use of both fossil fuel and biomass fuel in different stages of the iron making, leading to great confusion, especially with authenticity studies.

Type
Articles
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , 2002 , pp. 717 - 732
Copyright
Copyright © The Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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