What the use of radioisotope in archeology?
Archaeologists can use isotopes for various things including dating artifacts, understanding where artifacts come from (such as what region animals were raised in, or where resources were mined) and reconstructing past dietary habits.See related questions belowI'm no professional on this, but I think I can contribute to something.Isotopes, (I hope you already know this), are types of the same element, but with different mass, usually due to different numbers of neutrons.Have you heard of Carbon-Dating? This is when they check objects for specific isotopes and thus giving an estimate of how old the object is.Carbon Dating, obviously, means the using of the element Carbon to date objects. Carbon-14, an isotope of Carbon, is unstable and radioactive, which means that scientists are able to easily detect the amount of it. Over time, Carbon-14 will 'decompose' into Nitrogen-14, a more stable isotope. This means that, within a carbon object, the lower the number of Carbon-14 isotopes, the older the object.There's a whole lot of math to it, and I can't exactly explain it just yet. But I hope this gives you the basic understanding.Archaelogists use Isostopes, a common one is carbon-14 to discover the age of bones, or other material. The amount of carbon 14 will decay at a fixed rate so, by measuring the amount of carbon-14 compared with carbon-12, scientists can know how old it is.
