Archaeological site

A carbon sample of mass 1.00 g from wood found in an archaeological site in Arizona underwent 7.90 X 103 carbon-14 disintegrations in a period of 20.0 h. In the same period, 1.00 g of carbon from a modern source underwent 1.84 X 104 disintegrations. Calculate the age of the sample given that the half-life of 14C is 5.73 ka. 

Hedges, R.E.M., Millard, A.R. and Pike, A.W.G. 1995 Measurements and relationships of diage-netic alteration of bone from three archaeological sites. Journal ofArchaeological Science 22 201-209. 

The detailed results of the analyses of the excavated human bones and soil samples from the respective archaeological sites are the subject of a forthcoming paper (Balzer et al. 1997, Turban-Just, in prep.). Therefore, only the major topics relating to the experimental approach shall be considered here. 

Burning a small sample of this charcoal gives gaseous CO2 that, when placed in a counter, registers 1.75 decays per second. When an equal mass of CO2 from fresh charcoal is placed in this counter, the count rate is 3.85 decays per second. How old is the archaeological site ... 

C22-0112. A 250-mg sample of CO2 collected from a small piece of wood at an archaeological site gave 1020 counts over a 24-hour period. In the same counting apparatus, 1.00 g of CO2 from freshly cut wood gave 18,400 counts in 20 hours. What age does this give for the site ... 

Bones and teeth, however, are primary archaeological materials and are common to many archaeological sites. Bones bearing cut marks from stone tools are a clear proxy for human occupation of a site, and in the study of human evolution, hominid remains provide the primary archive material. Hence, many attempts have been made to directly date bones and teeth using the U-series method. Unlike calcite, however, bones and teeth are open systems. Living bone, for example, contains a few parts per billion (ppb) of Uranium, but archaeological bone may contain 1-100 parts per million (ppm) of Uranium, taken up from the burial environment. Implicit in the calculation of a date from °Th/U or Pa/ U is a model for this Uranium uptake, and the reliability of a U-series date is dependent on the validity of this uptake model. 

Glaii Samples from archaeological sites Skorba (Mafia)... 

Soils altered in the past by human habitation are not difficult to find. Farmers in many regions of North America, for example, noted that the soil of old Indian villages was more productive than adjacent soils. The unique properties of soils from ancient inhabited places have frequently been put to use in many places in the world farmers in the Ashdod area in Israel and El Phosfat in Egypt, for example, used the soil that they excavated from ancient archaeological sites to fertilize the land they cultivated (Wright 1986). 

Most wood is durable and, under favorable environmental conditions, can last for extremely long periods of time. This is why in most areas of the world wood remains from all periods are often found in archaeological sites. Like all materials, however, wood is susceptible to weathering and biodegradation. 

The burning process leaves very little solid remains only ash, made up of inorganic salts that rarely make up more than a few percent of the total mass of wood. When wood bums with a restricted supply of air, however, and there is insufficient oxygen to combine with all the carbon in the wood, the remains are made up of charcoal, a very porous and impure form of carbon. Charcoal is extremely stable it does not decay, nor is it altered by most microorganisms, and it may be preserved for very long periods of time charcoal often also preserves the morphology of the burned wood. Because of its stability, charcoal residues are often found in archaeological sites where wood was either used as fuel or otherwise burned. 

Bachmann, H. G. (1982), The Identification of Slags from Archaeological Sites, Historical Metallurgical Publications, Institute of Archaeology, London Univ., London. 

Biro, K. T., I. Pozsgai, and A. Vlader (1986), Electron beam micro-analysis of obsidian samples from geological and archaeological sites, Acta Archaeologica Academia Scientiarium Hungaricae 38, 257-278. 

Chaplin, R. E. (1971), The Study of Animal Bones from Archaeological Sites, Seminar, London. 

Cook, S. F. and R. F. Heizer (1965), Studies on the Chemical Analysis of Archaeological Sites, Publications in Archaeology, Vol. 2, Univ. California, Berkeley. 

Hedges, R. E. M. and A. R. Millard (1995b), Measurements and relationships of diagenetic alteration of bone from three archaeological sites,. Archaeol. Sci. 22, 201-209. 

Marschner, R. F and H. T. Wright (1978), Asphalts from Middle Eastern archaeological sites, in Carter, G. F. (ed.), Archaeological Chemistry, Advances in Chemistry Series, Vol. 2, ACS, Washington, DC. 

Ottaway, J. H. and M. R. Mathews (1988), Trace element analysis of soil samples from a stratified archaeological site, Environ. Geochem. Health 10,105-112. 

M.P. Colombini, G. Giachi, F. Modugno, P. Pallecchi, E. Ribechini, The characterization of paints and waterproofing materials from the shipwrecks found at the archaeological site of the Etruscan and Roman harbour of Pisa (Italy). Archaeometry, 45, 659 674 (2003). 

A second application of DI-MS was in the analysis of archaeological adhesive of a blackish amorphous residue present on the chape of a bronze sword, discovered in a tomb from the Iron Age (ca. 800 700 BC) at the archaeological site of Argancy (Moselle, France). In the mass spectrum (Figure 3.13) the ion fragment at mlz 189, which is characteristic of triterpenoid compounds, is evident and represents the base peak. 

Figure 3.14 Mass spectrum of the sample from the censer found in the archaeological site at...

Figure 3.17 DE mass spectrum of the resinous material collected from the Roman amphora recovered from a waterlogged archaeological site in Liguria (Italy) [18]...

K. Kimpe, C. Drybrooms, E. Schrevens, P. A. Jacobs, R. Degeest and M. Waelkens, Assessing the relationship between form and use of different kinds of pottery from the archaeological site Sagalassos (southwest Turkey) with lipid analysis, Journal of Archaeological Science, 31, 1503 1510(2004). 

To highlight and explain the quantitative chemical differences between the pitches found in the two archaeological sites, a chemometric evaluation of the GC/MS data (normalized peak areas) by means of principal component analysis (PCA) was performed. The PCA scatter plot of the first two principal components (Figure 8.6) highlights that the samples from Pisa and Fayum are almost completely separated into two clusters and that samples from Fayum form a relatively compact cluster, while the Pisa samples are... 

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