Un-Dating the Canadian Arctic
While the C-14 Method of dating has perhaps been the most important tool ever developed for prehistorians, the results of this technique have not been an unmixed blessing. This is especially true in the far north where wood charcoal, the standard medium for C-14 determinations in most other areas, i...
| Published in: | Memoirs of the Society for American Archaeology |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
1976
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0081130000000745 https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0081130000000745 |
| Summary: | While the C-14 Method of dating has perhaps been the most important tool ever developed for prehistorians, the results of this technique have not been an unmixed blessing. This is especially true in the far north where wood charcoal, the standard medium for C-14 determinations in most other areas, is only infrequently recovered. Other substances—bone, ivory, blubber, and skin from sea mammals; sod, grass, and peat; bone and antler from terrestrial mammals; and occasionally driftwood or locally available twigs either burned or unaltered—have been submitted for radiocarbon analysis in the hope of unraveling the complex relationships between man and nature in the Arctic through the development of accurate absolute chronologies of events which characterized Eskimo prehistory during the last four or five thousand years. Most prehistorians engaged in Arctic research have long been aware of gross inconsistencies in the results obtained from C-14 laboratories, and several specialists from these laboratories have offered suggestions for correcting our anomalous results. To date, however, no one seems to have taken the trouble to collect radiocarbon determinations from the Arctic and evaluate them with respect to the known but only partially explained discrepancies between dates obtained on wood charcoal and those obtained on other substances. The following attempt to do so for Arctic Canada and northern Greenland is an indication of what might be accomplished by a less indiscriminate use of radiocarbon dates. |
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