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Radiocarbon Dates—A Suggestion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Lee Abel
Lee Abel*
Affiliation:
Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff, ArizonaFebruary, 1953
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Extract

As we read the archaeological reports of recent years, many of us are becoming slightly appalled at the vast store of information that is coming to us each month ffpm the laboratories processing radiocarbon specimens. This material is rapidly being absorbed into the archaeological literature where, in its present form, it presents a slightly confusing picture. Most of us learned our archaeological chronologies in the old Gregorian calendrical system and to have, for example, a date of 8431 ± 475 B.P. suddenly thrown at us gives our delicate nervous systems quite a shock. Undoubtedly many archaeologists will confess that they must mentally subtract 1950 years from such a radiocarbon date to be able to fit it into their long-established chronological systems.

A more serious criticism is this: the literature is rapidly becoming flooded with radiocarbon dates, dating back at present from the years between 1948 and 1953. The physicists seem to feel that time stopped somewhere around the year 1950, and thus all historical dating in the future can be made from that date.

Type
Facts and Comments
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , October 1953 , pp. 158
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1953

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