ANTA01H3 Lecture Notes - Radiocarbon Dating, Biostratigraphy, Basalt
Document Summary
Relative dating: provides relative ordering, tells you how old, but not by how much such as a is older than b. Absolute dating: provides actual date rather than saying a is older, it will say a is 2500 years older than. Stratigraphy: study of earth layer, follows principle of super positioning which is just saying that the lower layers were deposited earlier. Law of faunal succession: strata that consist of fossils of the same animals are of the same age. Cross-dating estimates age of artifacts based on similarities with dated context, such as cars. Carbon 14 dating- decays into nitrogen 14 with a half-life of 5730 years (+-40 years), can date anything organic that is ~1000 years old, absolute max, ~50,000 years. Ecofacts- natural materials found from a site, unmodified. They can find out about- age, sex, health status, appearance, some aspects of behavior.
