Archeology has undoubtedly enriched mankind's understanding of history more than any other discipline. Archeology has unraveled a great part of man's unwritten past. Studying the material remains of past human life and activities may not seem important or exciting to the average person when compared to other scientific pursuits like the biological sciences. But archeology's aim to understand mankind is a noble endeavor that goes well beyond uncovering buried treasures. Knowing what made past cultures cease to exist may indeed provide the key to making sure that history does not repeat itself.
However, when it comes to dating archeological samples, several timescale problems arise. For example, Christian time counts the birth of Christ as the beginning, AD 1 (Anno Domini); everything that occurred before Christ is counted backwards from AD as BC (Before Christ). The Greeks consider the first Olympic Games as the beginning or 776 BC. The Muslims count the Prophet's departure from Mecca, or the Hegira, as their beginning at AD 662. The Mayan calendar used 3114 BC as their reference. As a result, carbon dating began to emerge as the most popular and accepted form of determining the absolute dating of artifacts and events. However, this technique is not without its limitations or risks.
First, the size of the archeological sample is important. Larger samples are better because purification and distillation remove some matter. Although new techniques for working with very small samples have been developed, like accelerator dating, these are very expensive and still somewhat experimental. Second, because the decay rate is logarithmic, radiocarbon dating has significant upper and lower limits. It is not very accurate for fairly recent deposits. In recent deposits so little decay has occurred that the error factor (the standard deviation) may be larger than the date obtained.
Despite all of this, carbon dating remains a useful tool for archeological research, helping archeologists obtain a much needed global perspective on the timing of major prehistoric events.