UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The core facilities of the Institutes of Energy and the Environment, Energy and Environmental Sustainability Laboratories, will host a webinar from 12:30–1:30 p.m. on Nov. 16. The webinar will focus on research into whether leather, hide and parchment can accurately be radiocarbon dated and what pretreatment protocols should be used for removing carbon contamination that came from external factors and not from the original protein structure of these materials.
Penn State’s Radiocarbon Laboratory staff, Brendan Culleton, an assistant research professor, and Maggie Davis, a research technologist, will present the webinar. Attendees must register for the webinar.
Leather, hide and parchment in archaeological, historic and museum settings are challenging to radiocarbon date. They are comparable to bone collagen in many respects but with much less empirical study to guide pretreatment approaches. Sample pretreatment is complicated and may not offer accurate results for all samples due to the varied radiocarbon content of chemicals used in manufacturing these materials.
To further this work, the researchers have evaluated pretreatment techniques on two modern vegetable-tanned leather samples, an untanned modern rabbit skin, a late-medieval parchment sample, and four archaeological hide samples from Cougar Mountain Cave in Oregon.