The lacquer scabbard of a bronze sword dating from the Warring States (476–221 BCE) and excavated Ba tomb Lijiaba site (Chongqing, southwest China) was characterized by multidisciplinary approach including microscopy, scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (SEM-EDS), Raman spectroscopy pyrolysis–gas chromatography/mass (Py-GC/MS). Pyrolysis-comprehensive two-dimension...

Archaeological excavations in the Areni-1 cave complex in southeastern Armenia revealed installations and artifacts dating to around 4000 cal. BCE that are strongly indicative of wine production. Chemical evidence for this hypothesis is presented here using a new method to detect the anthocyanin malvidin that gives grapes and pomegranates their red color. Using solid phase extraction (SPE) and ...

This article traces the metrological history of radiocarbon, from the initial breakthrough devised by Libby, to minor (evolutionary) and major (revolutionary) advances that have brought (14)C measurement from a crude, bulk [8 g carbon] dating tool, to a refined probe for dating tiny amounts of precious artifacts, and for "molecular dating" at the 10 µg to 100 µg level. The metrological advances...

Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) is classically used in U-Pb dating to measure U and Pb isotopic concentrations. Recently, it has become frequently fission-track (FT) chronometry too. As an advantage, the FT double will enable efficiently determining crystallization ages thermo-tectonic history concurrently as samples volume, analytical time, efforts, cost...

Many readers know the tale of how William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) calculated the age of the Earth from physical principles and adhered for over 50 years to an estimate that was far younger than geologists’ estimates, despite the virtually unanimous opposition of the geological community of the time. The prevalent version of this tale alleges that the discovery of radioactivity simultaneousl...

Let X be a (quasi-projective) variety over k. We follow [Sha13, Chap. 6, §1.2].

An enamel fragment from the Border Cave 5 specimen was analysed with non-destructive ESR combined with laser ablation ICP-MS for uranium profiling. We obtained an age of 74+/-5 ka which fits exactly into the chronological framework that has been previously established for Border Cave by a variety of dating techniques. The result lays at rest the view that BC5 could be of Iron Age, as was implie...

Metabolite profiling has been established as a multiparallel strategy for relative quantification of a mixture of compounds or compound classes using chromatography and universal detection technologies (gas chromatography-mass spectrometry [GC-MS], liquid chromatography-MS). Despite its origins dating back to the late 1960s, it was only in the 1980s that its use was acknowledged to diagnose met...