C-14 D-REAMS

TECHNOLOGY WATCH: The Israeli lab keeping cultural heritage alive. We take a tour of a special laboratory in Rehovot that is focused on preserving and dating history – and has even rewritten it (STEPHEN ORYSZCZUK, Jewish News/Times of Israel).

D-REAM stands for the Dangoor Research Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory, inaugurated in 2012 by British Jewish philanthropist David Dangoor and his wife Judy, both scientists.

The lab is run by Italian-born Elisabetta Boaretto – described as “one of the rock-stars of archaeology” – together with her colleague Lior Regev, and they gave me a tour just before the country began closing its borders.

This is a place of work and study. Give them a viable organic sample, such as a bone fragment, and the team gets pre-screening, pre-treating, CO2 extracting, graphitising, pressing and AMS-ing to work out its age. It is a world of catalyst weights, cathode locations, infrared analysis, field calibration, cellulose fractions, oxelate peaks, “probable absolutes” and something intriguingly called a “wiggle model”.

It sounds as though this lab, which is new to me, has been making important advances in archaeology and even history.

Cross-file under Carbon-14 Dating and Material Culture. Some relevant PaleoJudaica posts are here and links.

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