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LoginThe use of radiocarbon dating to understand the chronological sequence of events and behaviors preserved in the archeological record requires a nuanced and critical interpretive approach. This section discusses the importance of vetting radiocarbon data and thinking critically about how a date relates to the archeological event or question of interest, whether new or legacy data. To many, radiocarbon dating seemed like a magic black box which yielded objectively scientific results. The widespread belief in the objective power of radiocarbon science persisted for several decades, eventually waning with the rejection of the culture-historical approach to archeology. Advances such as accelerator mass spectrometry AMS to radiocarbon dating in the s made clear that some radiocarbon assays were simply better than others. In recent decades, the popularity of Bayesian statistics for analyzing large radiocarbon datasets has refocused attention on the importance of rigorous radiocarbon reporting and data vetting. Archeologists today have access to staggering amounts of radiocarbon data from large crowd-sourced databases like the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database. By employing data hygiene methods , as the vetting of large datasets is often referred, the archeologist endeavors to cull potentially unreliable and irrelevant assays from a data set, to build more accurate and precise chronologies.
Radiocarbon, or Carbon, dating is probably one of the most widely used and best known absolute dating methods. It was developed by J. Arnold and W. Libby in , and has become an indispensable part of the archaeologist's tool kit since. It's development revolutionized archaeology by providing a means of dating deposits independent of artifacts and local stratigraphic sequences.
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