Radiocarbon Wiggle-Match Dating in the Intertidal Zone

Abstract

Radiocarbon wiggle-match dating is a technique that can combine the versatility of radiocarbon dating with chronological information from tree-rings. This makes it useful in contexts where timbers are preserved, but dendrochronological dating is impossible. As intertidal and marine timbers are waterlogged, this can favour their preservation and hence allow wiggle-match 14 C dating, which can be of significant help in deriving relatively precise chronologies for a range of coastal structures. As the technique depends on making multiple radiocarbon measurements towards a single date, efficiency in application is the key and hence a number of practical considerations need to be taken into account in advance of conducting a dating programme. This paper discusses some of these practical concerns and reviews them in the context of the intertidal crannogs in the Firth of Clyde on the west coast of Scotland.

Is the dating of short tree-ring series still a challenge? New evidence from the pile dwelling of Lucone di Polpenazze (northern Italy)

“…Indeed, two main problems arise: I) the possibility that the 14 C dating lands entirely on a long, flat section of the calibration curve, in which case the short length of the tree-ring series may lead to high dating uncertainty; and II) difficulties in the resolution of both the dated short-sequence sample and the calibration curve, where a different resolution reduces the probability of obtaining reliable results (Jacobsson et al 2018;Marshall et al 2019). Indeed, if single-year tree-ring measurement should, in principle, be preferable for maximizing the short-term radiocarbon variability, and hence the precision of calibration results (Wacker et al 2014), comparison with the IntCal13 calibration curve based on a minimal resolution of 10 years from 1500 AD back in time (Reimer et al 2013), reveals that the desired increase in precision fails and that the obtained fit is in fact more likely to show a systematic offset (Jacobsson et al 2017(Jacobsson et al , 2018. The current effort of the IntCal working group concerns the reconstruction of the calibration curve at annual resolution, and several studies have already contributed to this task (Pearson et al 2018;Capano et al 2018Capano et al , 2020Sava et al 2019;Eastoe et al 2019;Reimer et al 2020).…”