At 21:49 04/05/99 -0400,Willam Conner wrote:
>Thanks to all who replied to my posting on van der Merwe's book "The
Carbon-14 Dating of Iron." A gap in my knowledge of archaeo-metallurgy has
now been filled. I'm no longer bewildered by Martha Goodway's 4-29-99
posting, "Re: Analysis of copper and iron artifacts" and now know that van
der Merwe's C-14 dating of iron didn't prove to be of much practical use to
archaeology.
I have been reading these exchanges with great interest, since I contributed
2kg of the Roman nails from the Inchtuthil Agricolan fortress for Nick van
der Merwe's work. Maybe it was just chance, but he dated these to the
correct decade of the 1st century AD. I suspect that the age of the wood
used for charcoal becomes less important when you are dating earlier iron
objects. The main problem is the very low carbon content of bloomery iron,
which means large samples are needed (though this should be less of a
problem nowadays with accelerator dating).
Incidentally, I think we have assume that coppicing was used from very
eartly times. John Coles claims that there is evidence of it from the
Neolithic Sweet Track in south-western Britain, and my calculations and
observations confirm that it was regularly used on the Roman ironworks in
the Weald of south-eastern Britain.
Henry Cleere
Dr Henry Cleere
World Heritage Coordinator
ICOMOS
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