Simple Pretreatment Method Development for Iron and Calcium Carbonate Samples

From the 20th International Radiocarbon Conference held in Kona, Hawaii, USA, May 31-June 3, 2009.Since iron artifacts generally contain trace amounts of carbon, an iron sample needs to be relatively large, as compared to other materials, and a specially designed combustion system is required. An elemental analyzer (EA) was used for the combustion of iron without any special chemical treatment. CO2 gas with 1 mg of carbon was obtained from the combustion of an iron artifact by using an EA and reduced to graphite for accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) measurement. In this work, AMS dating results done at the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM) for several ancient iron artifacts are presented and compared with independently estimated ages. This method was found to be useful for the pretreatment of iron artifacts that contained 0.1% carbon. A simple pretreatment method using an EA was also applied to calcium carbonate (CaCO3) samples. Samples were preheated overnight at 100-300 C, without any special chemical treatment. This removed modern CO2 contamination and the background level decreased to a comparable value measured in samples treated with phosphoric acid under vacuum.The Radiocarbon archives are made available by Radiocarbon and the University of Arizona Libraries. Contact lbry-journals@email.arizona.edu for further information.Migrated from OJS platform February 202