How do anthropologists know how to date prehistoric artifacts and cave paintings?

Question

For example, when they say some cave painting is 3000 B.C.E. years old..how do they know that?

Answer 1

There is no accurate way of dating artifacts, they are basically just guessing.  Every dating method used today makes major assumptions that are entirely unreliable.  The only real way to really know how old an artifact is is to have been there when it was created.

For example, in ww2 planes were abandoned on an arctic ice sheet, 40 years later they were found under tens of thousands of "annual" ice layers.

Also, carbon dating makes major assumptions about the amount of radioactive carbon in the air thousands of years ago, no one today knows how much radioactive carbon was in the atmosphere any farther than one or two hundred years ago.  Carbon dating also has the problem of hydronic leeching, moisture will remove radioactive carbon from material making it appear drastically older.

Layers in rocks almost never correspond to any measurable number of years, I could go into examples of why but this should be obvious to any but the most casual observer.

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Answer 2

they can carbon date the pigmant used to paint. they can also use geology, counting sediment layers ect. it is sometimes a guess but an educated one.

Answer 3

a lot of it is done by carbon-14 dating. Every thing that was once alive has a certain amount of a certain isotope, carbon-14. after death the carbon-14 degrades slowly at a very specific rate. Using this information they can work backword and find how old something is. If they are trying to date something inorganic, they date the material around that item.

Answer 4

Trivia - although archaeology is a discipline of anthropology, this is an archaeology question.