Radiocarbon Dating Paper Documents and Photographs

This talk follows a research thread that began with attempts to date various types of paper documents. There are generally two motivations for this: the forensic determination of age of documents of legal import, and; the determination of age of works of art on paper. The approach I explored was to combine radiocarbon measurement on the paper substrate with measurement of the radiocarbon content of the gelatin from the photographic emulsion. Dr. Gregory Hodgins, Director of the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Lab at the University of Arizona