Sentences with phrase «conventional radiocarbon dating»

Continuous series of tree - ring dated wood samples have been obtained for roughly the past 10,000 years which give the approximate correct radiocarbon age, demonstrating the general validity of the conventional radiocarbon dating technique.Several long tree - ring chronologies have been constructed specifically for use in calibrating the radiocarbon time scale.Some may have mistaken this to mean that the sample had been dated to 20,000 radiocarbon years.The second characteristic of the measurement of radiocarbon is that it is easy to contaminate a sample which contains very little radiocarbon with enough radiocarbon from the research environment to give it an apparent radiocarbon age which is much less than its actual radiocarbon age.

It was, however, difficult to exactly determine the age of the human skeletal material using conventional radiocarbon dating, because the collagen in the bones had been completely washed out due to the long period spent in water.