Accurate compound-specific C dating of archaeological pottery vessels.

Pottery is one of the most commonly recovered artefacts from archaeological sites. Despite more than a century of relative dating based on typology and seriation, accurate dating of pottery using the radiocarbon dating method has proven extremely challenging owing to the limited survival of organic temper and unreliability of visible residues. Here we report a method to directly date archaeological pottery based on accelerator mass spectrometry analysis of C in absorbed food residues using palmitic (C) and stearic (C) fatty acids purified by preparative gas chromatography.