Carbon-14 Whiskey
Aarchaeologists have been known, from time to time, to imbibe drinks whose alcoholic content is measurable - and archaeology students are particular offenders in this regard. It is further to be noted that while students favour anything alcoholic in a fairly undiscriminating manner, older and more experienced archaeologists favour older and more expensive substances and fine wines and aged whiskies have been known to appear on their tables.
The field of archaeology is littered with enterprising individuals who feel that, but for a coating or two of dirt, they could produce primitive artefacts just as good as those dug up by the archaeologists. Shapira and his Moabite forgeries, Piltdown Man, the Amarna Princess in Bolton, and many many others are evidence of the way in which forgers seek to fill the demand of archaeologists for old objects, so it is hardly surprising that forgers should turn their attention to the old substances archaeologists - and others - ingest. Those vintage wines and lovingly aged whiskies have been known to be the product of last year and some clever chemistry.
As wine auctions - as well as the wine lists in exclusive hotels - show, old alcohol can command extraordinary prices. Bottles of vintage wines and whiskies can sell for thousands of pounds, a fact that makes me glad I am teetotal. Drinking something that cost pounds per drop would turn the substance, no matter how delicate its flavour, to dust and ashes in this Scottish man's mouth. If I were to subsequently discover that in fact the drink in question was a forgery life would no longer be worth living - and it appears that I am not alone in this feeling. Scientists have, therefore, turned to one of the tools of archaeology to make sure that expensive wines are the genuine product and not a recent forgery.
Invented in 1949 by Professor Libby at the University of Chicago, carbon-14 dating is based on the belief that radioactive decay rates do not change. If you can discover the amount of decay that has taken place you can - in theory - discover the age of the object you are dating. In practice, however, there are a multitude of problems associated with carbon-14 dating. Human activities in the past, such as the felling and burning of forests, have decreased the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere, disturbances in the magnetosphere have increased the ratio. In the recent past, the Industrial Revolution decreased the ratio, due to the burning of oil and coal, while since the 1950s atomic bomb blasts have almost doubled the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12.
A graph has been produced that attempts to calibrate carbon-14 ages with real ages by taking all these effects into account: in the last 10,000 years the average uncertainty is 335 years, but in the worst case scenario it can be 801 years! The graph also takes into account the fact that Libby was using an erroneous figure for the half-life of carbon-14, which he believed to be 5568±30 years. A later and more accurate figure of 5730±40 years is presently accepted.
Still, the dating of Egyptian timbers and Peruvian mummies pales into insignificance compared to the weighty question of whether that £2,000 bottle of whiskey was worth its price or was a cheap, modern forgery and researchers from the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit have duly turned their attention to these more important questions. Samples - alas, only millilitres in size - have been taken and subjected to the relentless scrutiny of the Geiger counter. They have discovered that, thanks to all those atom bombs, fake whiskies carry a distinctive signature of radio-active elements that makes detection swift and sure. Older whiskies and wines are more difficult as the uncertainties inherent in the carbon-14 process make it impossible to assign production to a single year - essential if you want to know whether you were buying from the vintage year of 18*1 or from the not quite as good year of 18*2 - but at least they can tell which century the wine was from.
"The earliest whiskey we have dated came from the 1700s," one researcher boasted. He did not tell of the agony of spirit experienced by all in the lab as they watched the delighted purchaser bear his bottle away, happy in the knowledge that every drop was worth whatever he had paid for it.
average uncertainty This is one reason why a revised chronology has been adopted at Cambridge University, more or less in line with the suggestions made by Peter James in his book Centuries of Darkness. By removing a false calibration and relying more on the raw carbon-14 dates, the Cambridge historians have been able to delete two centuries from Egyptian history. I personally think it likely that other "calibrations" will need to be discarded and that by the time of the Early Bronze Age it may be possible to remove as much as six centuries. Return
© Kendall K. Down 2009
