14th April 2012, 06:55 PM
Presumably for ancient buried materials (which the original technique didn't have to deal with), they have the nightmare of having to assess the changes in burial environment over time, particularly since no two bits of ground are the same so they'd have to 'guesstimate' the absorbtion rrate for every sample from scratch - can see this going the same way as DNA dating, good idea but will it actually work in practice on buried archaeological materials?