Accurate knowledge on marine reservoir effect is particularly important to estimate active periods of archeological sites in Japan. Since most of archeological sites are situated in an alluvial plain in Japan, archeological remains include inevitably marine products. To obtain precise calendar ages for marine samples such as shell fragments and sea mammal bones by 14C dating, a correction for marine reservoir effect is inevitable. In addition, 14C ages on a collagen fraction extracted from human bones should be corrected for the sources of their diet, the uptake ratio of terrestrial food to marine one. However, the local fluctuation of marine reservoir effect around Japan archipelago is not known well. This study gives a marine reservoir correction deduced from 14C dates on marine shells and terrestrial plants collected from cored sediments or shell-mound excavations at archeological sites in Japan.
The paired marine and terrestrial samples were collected at archeological shell mounds in Aichi and Saga prefectures. The obtained values of marine reservoir correction (delta-R) for the sites were compared with those (delta R values are nearly equal to zero) at Noto peninsula, Ishikawa prefecture.
14C dating was conducted for graphite synthesized from CO2 that was produced from shell carbonate and plant residues, with a HVEE Tandetron AMS system at Nagoya University (Nakamura et al., 2004).
T. Nakamura, et al. Nucl. Instrum. Meth. B223-224, 124-129 (2004).
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