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Quality Assurance of Ultrafiltered Bone Dating

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

Fiona Brock ,
Christopher Bronk Ramsey  and
Thomas Higham
Fiona Brock*
Affiliation:
Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, Dyson Perrins Building, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, United Kingdom
Christopher Bronk Ramsey
Affiliation:
Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, Dyson Perrins Building, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, United Kingdom
Thomas Higham
Affiliation:
Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, Dyson Perrins Building, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, United Kingdom
*
Corresponding author. Email: fiona.brock@archaeology-research.oxford.ac.uk
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Abstract

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Ultrafiltration of bone collagen provides a method of purification that can be very effective in reducing environmental contamination from soil-derived amino acids as well as removing degraded collagen or other short-chain proteins. The Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU) first implemented ultrafiltration in the pretreatment of bone material for accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating in 2000. However, the filters themselves contain carbonaceous material, and thus stringent quality control is required to demonstrate that this does not affect the accuracy of the dating. Here, we present quality assurance data from the bone pretreatment and dating program at ORAU, including dates on known-age and background-age bones over a range of sample sizes, and measurements of residual carbon contamination present in the filters after cleaning.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , 2007 , pp. 187 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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