Accuracy radiocarbon dating
03-Jan-2020 07:07
Beginning in the 1990s, a coalition of researchers led by Paula J.
Shy of a date stamp on an object, it is still the best and most accurate of dating techniques devised.
Reimer and colleagues point out that Int Cal13 is just the latest in calibration sets, and further refinements are to be expected.
For example, in Int Cal09's calibration, they discovered evidence that during the Younger Dryas (12,550-12,900 cal BP), there was a shutdown or at least a steep reduction of the North Atlantic Deep Water formation, which was surely a reflection of climate change; they had to throw out data for that period from the North Atlantic and use a different dataset.
Radiocarbon dating is one of the best known archaeological dating techniques available to scientists, and the many people in the general public have at least heard of it.
But there are many misconceptions about how radiocarbon works and how reliable a technique it is.
Since that time, CALIB, now renamed Int Cal, has been refined several times--as of this writing (January 2017), the program is now called Int Cal13.