I finally got past the carbon dating problem at a site in Colorado

I was working on sorting artifacts from a site near Durango, and I kept hitting a wall with charcoal samples that were giving way older dates than the pottery suggested. Turns out the ground was contaminated with older organic material from a forest fire that happened maybe 200 years ago. It took me 3 months to figure out I needed to chemically pretreat the samples before sending them to the lab. Has anyone else dealt with contamination throwing off your timeline, or do you think the pottery is just that old despite the charcoal?

2 comments

2 Comments

ray_carr1mo ago

Yeah, pretreatment's usually the missing step there.

taylor_stone1mo ago

Oh man, that's so true! My buddy Jake was trying to seal his new patio and he just went straight to applying the sealer. It looked great for like two days and then started peeling up in these gross little flakes everywhere. He had to rent a pressure washer and spend a whole weekend stripping it all off and starting over. He told me after that he spent more time fixing it than he would have if he just prepped it right the first time.