Archaeology
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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.
Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.
The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...
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When it comes to pre-dating wood, do they do a carbon date on the material or cross relate the building designs matched to other structures in different material?
The article says they used luminescence dating to measure the amount of radiation the surrounding soil had soaked up over time:
Edit: ignore me. I oopsed. They did luminescence dating.
~~Wood is decent for C14 dating, especially when you're looking for range finder metrics. They likely took a direct sample. There's not really a lot of comparable material this old, mostly just due to the slow grind of time. C14 is calibrated on tree rings, so that's a likely next step for fine tuning the dating.~~
Interesting, I didn't think of the tree rings for fine tuning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcib9Fnv7-Y
Crash course in under 3 min.
How could carbon-14 possibly work for anything half a million years old? That's 87 half-lives!
Ha, you're right. Totally forgot there's that upper limit (To be fair I don't really do anything with stuff that old and I'm having waiting for dinner scatterbrains. :) ) . Going to have to dive into the paper I guess!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9
Looks like they did luminescence. More about that here: https://projects.arch.ox.ac.uk/luminescence.html
Aha! The supplemental materials contain all the interesting stuff, like some cool photos of the excavation site:
And section 2 goes into details about how the soil samples were collected and prepared for luminescence measurement, including keeping them in the dark/under red light lab room conditions while they were washed in acid for 3 days, before shining a laser on them. They even stuck gamma radiation probes into the holes they dug the samples from to measure the current background radiation levels there.
Interestingly in their calculation, only 5% of radiation comes from cosmic rays, and 95% from decay of nearby radioisotopes of uranium, thorium, and potassium. They were worried whether cyclical sedimentation/erosion activity of the adjacent river would change the thickness of the soil overlying the archeological site, thus affecting amount of cosmic radiation reaching it. Turns out for the final age calculation it didn't make much of a difference whether the soil was usually 5 meters thick or 10.
I would still need to read the reference papers to figure out how accumulated radiation is related to luminescence under a laser in the first place.
Ohhh is this the technique where they line up the tree rings with known climate events? It's certainly cool how many different methods they come up with to date things, although judging by the small size of those logs it doesn't seem like they would have very many years to work with.
Rangefinding helps narrow the window of the known sequence of signals recorded in rings. Check out the video I linked.