Carbon dating forensic science
Carbon-14 dating is a way of determining the age of certain archeological artifacts of a biological origin up to about 50,000 years old.
It is used in dating things such as bone, cloth, wood and plant fibers that were created in the relatively recent past by human activities.
Once the organism dies, however, it ceases to absorb carbon-14, so that the amount of the radiocarbon in its tissues steadily decreases.
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So the team used the same procedure as that used to analyse the samples produced for the research. This technique managed to spot the age of the ink on documents written up to five years previously and with an approximation margin of about 20%.
In other words, when applying this analysis procedure, the team can indicate whether the document was written 1,500 days previously (just over four years) with a margin of 300 days either way.
In these cases, significant dating errors occur because the type of paper used and the mass/quantity of the ink deposited influence the analysis.
The major crops were labor-intensive tobacco and hemp; breeding livestock, primarily horses, was also important to the economy.
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