Radiocarbon dating was the first chronometric technique widely available to archaeologists and was especially useful because it allowed researchers to directly date the panoply of organic remains often found in archaeological sites including artifacts made from bone, shell, wood, and other carbon based materials.

In contrast to relative dating techniques whereby artifacts were simply designated as "older" or "younger" than other cultural remains based on the presence of fossils or stratigraphic position, 14C dating provided an easy and increasingly accessible way for archaeologists to construct chronologies of human behavior and examine temporal changes through time at a finer scale than what had previously been possible.

Therefore a 1% error in fraction-modern leads to an 80 year error in the age.

Ages are rounded according to the convention of Stuiver & Polach, shown below.

This correction is performed as follows: $$Fm_ = Fm_ ( Fm_ - Fm_b)\frac$$ Where $$M$$ is sample mass, and $$M_b$$ and $$Fm_b$$ are the mass and Fm of the blank.

Fraction Modern is a measurement of the deviation of the C is also affected by natural isotopic fractionation.

In AMS, the filiamentous carbon or "graphite" derived from a sample is compressed into a small cavity in an aluminum "target" which acts as a cathode in the ion source.

The surface of the graphite is sputtered with heated, ionized cesium and the ions produced are extracted and accelerated in the AMS system.After acceleration and removal of electrons, the emerging positive ions are magnetically separated by mass and the C counts per second are collected.It is expected then, for a 5,570 year (1 half-life) or 11,140 year old (2 half-lives) sample that 125 or 63 counts per second would be obtained.Due to variability in sample homogeneity, sample collection, and sample processing, the variability of replicate samples (reproducibility) is generally greater than the reported error for a single sample.A total measurement error can be estimated by adding in quadrature the reported error with this extra variability, or added variance.One other situation that limits the age (if not already limited by the background age) is the error of the AMS result.

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