The fun with radiocarbon dates continues. I did manage to get a proposal off to a client, make some preparations for the summer field season and take care of the usual admin sorts of things. Otherwise, I was working on the C14 dates.
It was slow going, in part because I read French much more slowly than I do English, and I was working my way through the Blumer compendium of St. Lawrence dates, which requires looking in at least 3 places to figure out how to evaluate the dates. In some cases, one also has to go to other books to look at what the original excavator recorded (or didn’t). Thank goodness for the American Museum of Natural History and their very nice downloadable PDFs (although the link seems troubled at the moment) of their Anthropological Papers. I had a couple of them on my hard drive, which saved me a trip to get the actual books.
Anyway, St. Lawrence is going to be quite a mess. There are a lot of whale and walrus dates, and Dumond has calculated a correction for them by paired dating with terrestrial plants. The only problem is that the whales in St. Lawrence are the same stock as the whales they catch here, and whalebone C14 doesn’t turn over very fast (a couple of decades at least) so they average the ∂C13 over that period. That means that the correction factor for those whales should be the same anywhere in their range. We’ve worked on it here for the Nuvuk graves, and the correction factor that works is much smaller. I’m guessing walrus ingest relatively huge amounts of old carbon and skewed the calculations…
There was a very nice evening sky on the way home.
Out of Ice and Time 