Physics and Archaeology

Guinnessy writes: "In 1960 Willard Frank Libby won a Nobel Prize for his work on radiocarbon dating, a technique that truly revolutionize archaeology. Now Physics Today magazine has an article describing how new methods are yielding more accurate dates for our prehistoric ancestors, profoundly affecting our understanding of the past. Neat stuff."

Comments

Sometimes the oldest methods....

[Rackemup]

.... still have modern uses.

Before the radio-carbon dating and the physics of glow curves and AMS testing and all the other modern techniques were available, archaeologists were digging in the dirt looking for "old-stuff" to examine. It's a natural human behaviour, a curiousity to know where we came from.

So what did people use in the old days? Their eyes and their brains. Observations and an understanding of basic anatomy, history and geology are tools that you can take anywhere, don't require an expensive lab, and never need new batteries.

Today's technology may be nailing down more accurate dating, but human experience out in the field is still you're best place to start in an archaeological dig. While the two should compliment each other, the people who rely on machines to do all the work for them don't really understand what it means to be an archaeologist.

anthropology

[perdida]

We developed archaeology without any carbon dating. We had to use anthropological methods tofigure out what the meaning of a bunch of stuff in a dig was, and where it came from.

Carbon dating is a wonderful technology - it dates stuff within a range of a century or so. It enables us to confirm hypothesis made by other methods.

A more rigid and absolute dating technology would probably enable archaeologists to fill in many of the gaps in current knowledge.

I worry about too much reliance on an absolute technology, though. Even if you take a bore of soil and can tell the exact day when each item fell into it, you still learn nothing about trade routes, cultures, mythologies, ancient lifestyles, etc.

This is where anthropology, an inexact science, must take the lead.

Um....

[KillerBob]

First paragraph in the article... and already they've lost my (suspension of dis)belief....

==> Traditional archaeology has not been a field that suffers science easily. Only gradually have archaeologists accepted physics as a tool for archaeological research. Perhaps as a result, the physicists who work in archaeology, their methods, and their theories, are neither well known nor numerous. Archaeometry, as the wider field of scientific archaeology is known, has no Heisenbergs or Einsteins, uncertainty principles or relativity theories. The only physical discovery to truly revolutionize archaeology has been radiocarbon dating.

Physicists have developped ground-based RADAR technology and Echo-location technologies which are having a profound impact on the archaeological world.

Take a look at: http://www.exn.ca/inc/demo.asp?Video=exn20011009-a cadia.asx
(Windows media player format, sorry.)

These RADAR/SONAR devices have drastically reduced the time it takes to locate archaeological sites, and yet they don't even mention it until the end of the article. After having clearly stated that "The only physical discovery to truly revolutionize archaeology has been radiocarbon dating."