Zero BP Plus 34: 25 Years of Radiocarbon

Abstract

Very incautiously, after printing 25 volumes of Radiocarbon, the editors have authorized some personal reminiscence. Like all “Quaternary scientists”—no better collective name is available for our strange profession—I have been engaged in historiography, writing about history, for many years. In 1946, when natural radiocarbon was discovered, my subject, the sedimentary history of lakes, was only one of several kinds of historical record that needed, and soon received, a new reading. At the time, not all custodians of other kinds of record were ready to agree that new readings were conceivable, let alone necessary. The record of their persuasion—some of which has been written by Greg Marlowe (1980) in “W F Libby and the Archaeologists”—is part of the history of historiography. To the bibliography of this dangerously abstract subject I venture to add some minor footnotes. They come, not from historical research like Marlowe's, but from a leaky, selective memory.