Quality Assurance of Ultrafiltered Bone Dating

Abstract

Ultrafiltration of bone collagen provides a method of purification that can be very effective in reducing environmental contamination from soil-derived amino acids as well as removing degraded collagen or other short-chain proteins. The Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU) first implemented ultrafiltration in the pretreatment of bone material for accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating in 2000. However, the filters themselves contain carbonaceous material, and thus stringent quality control is required to demonstrate that this does not affect the accuracy of the dating. Here, we present quality assurance data from the bone pretreatment and dating program at ORAU, including dates on known-age and background-age bones over a range of sample sizes, and measurements of residual carbon contamination present in the filters after cleaning.