Frontiers of Archaeological Science
Resources Found
Radiocarbon and other dating techniques
Search Process
First of all I used the most simple seach process of using the search-engine Yahoo!. This splits search results into categories. Thus after typing in 'radiocarbon dating' - in Yahoo this means radiocarbon AND OR dating - I was given the following results:
Social Science: Anthropology and Archaeology: Archaeology: Archaeometry
Radiocarbon Dating and the Math - discusses what radiocarbon dating is, how it's done, and the math behind it. Includes logarithms.
Radiocarbon - International journal of radiocarbon and scientific dating
Social Science: Anthropology and Archaeology: Archaeology: Journals
Radiocarbon - International journal of radiocarbon and scientific dating
The other results were private laratories and instistues, which continued for several pages. The first page I looked up was Radiocarbon - the journal. This has an extensive resource of sample articles, and links to labratories. There is information for job offers, and books and resources linked to radiocarbon. Perhaps the main problem with this site is that it is for a journal, not the journal itself. Therefore it will not publish on the net all of its articles but tries to get visitors to subscribe.
The next page I looked at was the Radiocarbon Dating and the Math page. This is a private page written and maintained by I can only imagine a couple of students. It has a fairly comic and bizzare design (having to slap a monkey to send them an e-mail.). What it does have however is have a very good description of carbon dating to help explain it's basic concepts, which is very useful for students such as myself. It also contains formulae and graphs to help calculate dates, which makes it stand out from other sites.
By then clicking on the headings above these sites on Yahoo, I was given a list of other sites relevant to archeometry, which includes sites dealing withluminescence dating . Most of these are Univsersity labratory homepages, and have very little relevant information for enquiring students, but one or two have sample papers or research articles.
I then used the seach engine Hotbot. This differs from Yahoo as it does not have it's own search catagories. However it does probably have a more broad range of search. By typing un 'archaeometry' it gave links to pages from many conferences and universities. The first result took my notice however. This was from the University of Heidelberg, which has pages in German and English. It has pages detailing several dating methods including luminescence, ESR, fission tracks and Uranium series dating. These are very useful for students such as myself whose modules cover these subjects.