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How does carbon dating work on a statue? Wouldn't it be dating the underlying material (i.e. the stone), which presumably predates the actual carving of the st
by asvitkine 3y ago
How does carbon dating work on a statue?
Wouldn't it be dating the underlying material (i.e. the stone), which presumably predates the actual carving of the statue out of that material?
Edit: I guess if it was buried, they date the organic material around it.
- defrost 3y agoThere's very little, if any, carbon in stone. They dated the charcoal in layers settled about the statue: https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/2016/06/22/how-old-ist-it-dating-gobekli-tepe/ https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/2016/06/22/how-ol...
- p-e-w 3y ago> How does carbon dating work on a statue? It doesn't, and the stone itself is typically hundreds of millions or even billions of years old. However, many ancient artifacts are found buried in the ground, and it is often possible to carbon-date organic material in the soil surrounding the artifact, which produces an estimate for when it was buried. This is typically combined with historians' estimates for when the culture that presumably produced the artifact flourished, though uncertainties of several millennia remain in some cases.
- tephra 3y agoIn some cases you can also use luminescence dating[0], which can tell you the last time a mineral was exposed to sunlight. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminescence_dating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminescence_dating