The radiocarbon dating programmes of The National Museums of Scotland

Since 1991, the Archaeology Department of the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) has been undertaking programmes of AMS radiocarbon dating of organic items in its collections, particularly wetland finds. This work was initially stimulated by the success of Caroline Earwood’s research on dating bog butter containers and other wooden vessels from the National collections (Earwood 1990; 1993a; 1993b; 1997), which demonstrated among other things that the practice of bog butter deposition in Scotland extended at least as far back as the early centuries A