Augmented carbon 14 dating dedicated to Tribal Art
Born from CIRAM innovation, augmented carbon 14 dating dates your Tribal Art objects, no longer to within 250 or 300 years, but with an accuracy of only a few decades.
The CIRAM laboratories, specialists in carbon 14 dating since 2005, date your wooden, ivory, textile art objects. Thanks to advanced technologies and our teams of researchers, we date and analyze your ceramic, bronze, ivory, glass, but also wood objects.
For Tribal Art, our scientists are exposed to a problem: C14 dating is reliable for all periods, but it is not accurate for the last 300 years. Thanks to multiple sampling and a multidisciplinary approach, CIRAM scientists are able to circumvent this problem to deliver precise dating to within a few decades.
Precise dating of Tribal Art using the C14 isotope
Developed in the 1950s by Nobel Prize-winning chemist W.F Libby, radiocarbon dating is an effective method for dating organic materials such as wood, ivory, teeth, bones or even leather.
Used in the art world, but also in archaeology, it allows the analysis of artifacts up to 60,000 years old. But carbon-14 dating was a restrictive analysis until the 1980s, since it required a large sample (one gram of pure carbon). The development of particle gas pedals and mass spectrometry, AMS, has made it possible to divide the amount of material required by a factor of 1,000, and thus to preserve ancient remains as well as possible.
It is thanks to this revolution in the world of dating that it is now possible to use it on art objects, without altering the work.
Beware, it is possible to date the felling of a tree or the death of an elephant, but it is impossible to define the date of shaping the object (the sculpture for example).
Dating method thanks to carbon 14
Carbon 14 (also called radiocarbon or 14C) is a radioactive isotope of carbon whose half-life is equal to 5730 years. Its concentration will be divided by two every 5730 years. During its existence, a living organism assimilates carbon without isotopic distinction, because the proportion of 14C in relation to total carbon (12C,13C,14C) is the same as that existing in the atmosphere. Radiocarbon dating is therefore based on the presence of carbon in each living organism (of the order of 10-12 for the ratio 14C/C total). When the organism dies, exchanges with the atmosphere cease and the amount of carbon 14 decreases according to a known exponential law.
The difference between gross ages and calibrated dates
C14 dating is expressed in gross age called Before Present”. This age is based on the assumption that the 14C concentration has been constant in space and time. However, this assumption is false since we now know that C14 varies according to several factors such as temperature variations or geographical position (between the northern and southern hemispheres). To correct these fluctuations, the scientific community has established a calibration curve. It is for this reason that our scientists calibrate the raw C14 ages in order to obtain calibrated dates.