Chapter 6 Flashcards
What is the difference between relative and absolute dating?
Relative dating places sites, strata, features, and artifacts in relative order, without saying how much older or younger one site, stratum, feature, or artifact is than another.
Absolute dating provides specific ages or specific age ranges. Absolute dating methods are absolute in the sense that they provide a particular age range at a known level of probability.
What are the major dating techniques, what materials do they date, and what is their time range?
Tree-ring dating (dendrochronology) dates woods of particular species; it is limited to relatively small regions and usually cannot date samples that are more than 2000 years old.
Radiocarbon dating dates any organic material using the known rate of decay of 14C; it is useful for material less than 45,000 years old.
Trapped charge dating - thermoluminescence (TL), optically luminescence (OSL), and electron spin resonance (ESR) - date ceramicsenamel (κεραμικό σμάλτο), respectively. They date an object by calculating the amount of background radiation the object has been subjected to since the object’s electron “clock” was last reset by heat (TL) or sunlight (OSL). These techniques can extend back several hundred thousand years.
Argon-argon dates volcanic rock, especially ash. This technique can date volcanic layers that are millions of years old.
What are the major dating techniques of historic sites?
Documentary evidence usually provides for historical sites.
When such evidence is not available, known ages of particular artifact types are generated to create age range or median ages for historical features or sites using TPQ and mean ceramic age dates.
What do archaeological dates date?
Dating techniques tell us nothing directly about cultural activities. Radiocarbon dating, for example, tells us when a plant or an animal died - it is up to the archaeologist to relate the event being dated to a behavioral (cultural) event or interest.
