The Radiocarbon Dating of Tepe Qaleh Naneh for the Chronology of Late Chalcolithic Period in the Lake Zaribar Basin

Radiocarbon dating, also referred to as carbon-14 dating (14C), is a method widely used in archaeology to provide the ‘absolute dating’ of organic materials (seeds, wood, bones, and so on) intended as an approximate age within a range of years. This method allows to give a more precise framework of the events at first ordered according to the stratigraply and artefacts typology (relative dating). The amount of the unstable radioisotope carbon-14 on our planet has a relatively short half-life of 5,730 years; this means that the fraction of carbon-14 in a sample is halved over the course of 5,730 years due to radioactive decay to nitrogen-14. The process begins when an organism is no longer able to exchange carbon with its environment; therefore, by measuring the radioisotope carbon-14 we can able to approximate the date at which the organism lived. A first series of organic samples from Tepe Qaleh Naneh (7 in total), a large prehistoric site in the basin of the Zaribar Lake (Western Kurdistan), was selected to provide a more comprehensive understanding not only of the local cultural sequences but also of the relationship of the northern central Zagros with the surrounding regions, because the still few radiocarbon dates from Western Iran do not allow to synchronise the fieldwork results in this region with the Mesopotamian and other Iranian sequences. The Chalcolithic, especially the Late Chalcolithic-Uruk phase, is the longest and most important occupation period on the site. The 7 samples (5 charcoals and 2 bones) underwent the first pre-treatments at the Beta Analytics preparation Laboratories (USA) and were subsequently dated using the particle accelerator. From the radiocarbon age of the samples the calibrated calendar age was obtained using the internationally accepted database IntCal20 for northern hemisphere.