Toward a Thesaurus of Radiocarbon Dating and Related Terms

Abstract

The development of a Thesaurus of Radiocarbon Dating and Related Terms was undertaken to provide a basic common vocabulary of terms for the purpose of indexing an Annotated Bibliography of Radiocarbon Dating (1948–68) and form the basis of a language for information storage and retrieval in 14C dating and related term areas. The interdisciplinary nature of 14C dating dictates that selected terms have meanings in the context of archaeology, geology, earth sciences, oceanography, and environmental sciences, to name but a few, as well as chemistry and nuclear instrumentation on which the technique of 14C determinations is based. This paper describes the method used for selection of terms and explains the structure of the proposed thesaurus. A limited edition Draft Thesaurus was distributed to a selected panel of colleagues for critical evaluation.