Carbon dating results took 8 weeks, I was ready to give up

Honestly, I sent off a small charcoal sample from a dig site near Flagstaff expecting results in 2 weeks. The lab kept pushing the timeline back, first due to equipment calibration, then their backlog doubled. After 8 weeks I finally got the report and it changed my whole interpretation of the site. I had assumed the hearth was from a 1300s occupation based on pottery, but the radiocarbon range pointed to the 1100s. That meant the pottery style was older than the accepted sequence, which left me scrambling to re-check my stratigraphy notes. Turns out the layer I sampled was mixed from a later pit feature, so my original field sketch was wrong. Has anyone else had a lab delay that completely flipped their site story?

1 comments

Log in to join the discussion

Log In

1 Comment

jamieh7622d ago

Eight weeks is basically a whole semester, so at least you got a good story out of it. Nothing like redoing your whole site timeline because a lab couldn't get their calibration act together. At least the mixed layer explains it, way better than finding out your pottery sequence was just wrong the whole time.

9