These artifacts and ecofacts helped archeologists date the early nineteenth-century Hooe Dependency Site at Manassas National Battlefield Park. Matthew Reeves,University of Maryland. Archeology is a chronicle of past cultures through the centuries and millennia. The concept of time varies among world cultures.
How do scientists figure out how old things are? | Live Science
Archaeologists use many different techniques to determine the age of a particular artifact, site, or part of a site. Two broad categories of dating or chronometric techniques that archaeologists use are called relative and absolute dating. Stratigraphy is the oldest of the relative dating methods that archaeologists use to date things. Stratigraphy is based on the law of superposition--like a layer cake, the lowest layers must have been formed first. In other words, artifacts found in the upper layers of a site will have been deposited more recently than those found in the lower layers. Cross-dating of sites, comparing geologic strata at one site with another location and extrapolating the relative ages in that manner, is still an important dating strategy used today, primarily when sites are far too old for absolute dates to have much meaning.
The ability to precisely date, or identify the age of an object, can teach us when Earth formed, help reveal past climates and tell us how early humans lived. So how do scientists do it? Radiocarbon dating is the most common method by far, according to experts.
Archaeological finds worldwide have helped researchers to fill out the story of human evolution and migration. An essential piece of information in this research is the age of the fossils and artifacts. How do scientists determine their ages? Here are more details on a few of the methods used to date objects discussed in "The Great Human Migration" Smithsonian , July :. In a cave in Oregon, archaeologists found bones, plant remains and coprolites—fossilized feces.
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