Abstract
SEEING that the radioactive carbon method for dating the past so lucidly described by Prof. F. E. Zeuner in Nature of November 4, p. 755, was evolved primarily to test certain physical hypotheses, it may be of interest to physicists to see how far the application of the method to materials relatively or absolutely dated by archæological methods yields consistent or confirmatory results. More than five hundred radiocarbon dates have now been published1. Attached to each is the standard deviation, “consisting solely of the error of counting random events”. These dates include seven objects from Egypt and five from northern Europe, at least the relative ages of which are well established by archæological methods.
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References
“Radiocarbon Dates”, by J. R. Arnold and W. F. Libby (University of Chicago, Institute for Nuclear Studies, 1950).
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CHILDE, V. Comparison of Archæological and Radiocarbon Datings. Nature 166, 1068–1069 (1950). https://doi.org/10.1038/1661068b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1661068b0
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