# Accelorator mass spectrometry for dating

So if you have very large samples – you’ve got a big hunk of wood out of an archaeological site or a big piece of charcoal or something – and you have a very limited budget, conventional dating is worth doing because you get a result and you can possibly get more results with your budget than with AMS dating.

The techniques utilised in Paleolithic art; paintings of Chauvet, bas-relief sculptures of Cap Blanc, clay modellings of Le Tuc d’Audoubert, finger tracings of Cosquer, & engravings of Les Combarelles.Then a fraction $\chi_\mathrm = 10^$ of its carbon will initially be C-14.We can convert masses to atom counts with the factor $N_A/M$, where $N_A = 6\times10^\ \mathrm$ is Avogadro's number and $M = 12\ \mathrm$ is the molar mass of carbon.The measurement time is much more rapid – you don’t have to sit around and wait for the carbon-14s to decay – and also the precision is better.Well unfortunately, AMS dating is expensive because of the amount of equipment that’s involved and because the sample preparation is a lot more labour intensive.