Radiocarbon dating applied to archaeology
Datación por radiocarbono aplicada a la arqueología
- Date
- 1949 · confidence high
- Place
- University of Chicago, United States
- Credited to
- Willard Libby; calibration by Suess, Reimer (IntCal)
- People
- 👤 Willard Frank Libby1908–1980
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
Libby showed that the decay of carbon-14 makes it possible to date organic matter up to 50,000 years old. It gave archaeology and Quaternary geology an absolute chronology independent of typologies, triggering the 'radiocarbon revolution'.
Site of Libby's laboratory. Dendrochronological calibration corrected deviations of up to several centuries.
What it led to
- Absolute chronology of world prehistory
- Revision of the spread of the Neolithic and the megaliths (Renfrew)
- Dating of the Shroud of Turin and the Dead Sea Scrolls
- 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Built on
- Cosmic rays1912
- Dendrochronology1929
- Discovery of carbon-14 (Kamen and Ruben, 1940)
Made possible
- Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS)
- IntCal calibration curves