ANTHR 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Radiocarbon Dating, Paleomagnetism, Biostratigraphy
Document Summary
Relative dating (new car vs. old car: designating an event/artifact/fossil as being older or younger than another. Absolute or chronometric dating: dates for an event/artifact/fossil based on absolute measure of time (years, centuries, etc. ) Law of superposition: lower layers are older than higher layer: does not always apply (caves) Valuable in reconstructing the history of the earth. Drawback: disturbances shift strata and objects, making it difficult or impossible to reconstruct the history. Ordering cultural material from oldest to youngest based on stylistic changes. Using a known organism to date a site. Concerned with fossils and their use in dating rock formations. Uses regular processes that can be correlated to an absolute chronology to estimate the age of a site. Paleomagnetism: as they form they record negative polarity. Direction is used to correlate with geometric polarity time scale to infer an age for the site.
