PERSPECTIVES IN RADIOCARBON DATING BY RADIOMETRY.

Opportunities for individual contributions to the technology of radiocarbon dating over the past 40 years have been large. Meaningful developments are traced in this review of C-14 dating by gas proportional (GP) and liquid scintillation (LS) spectrometry. The performance of characteristic as well as state of the art GP and LS systems is tabulated and their merit for low-level counting of C-14 is evaluated. Future developments in radiometry will lie in the updating of existing systems to incorporate new technologies and the refinement of resolution and identification of extreme low-level signals. Parallel development with AMS, sharing on merit the ever widening applied C-14 research field, and enhanced interdisciplinary collaboration are foreseen as the scenario leading to the year 2000.