Radiocarbon (14C) dating introduced by Arnold and Libby (1949) was one of the most significant leaps in the history of archaeology, history and the history of art. This technique allows scientists to estimate the absolute date of death of any organism. Using the isotopic ratios of the radioactive carbon-14 and stable carbon-12 in the organism’s tissues and comparing it to the ratio in Earth’s atmosphere permits to calculate how long it was since the organism stopped exchanging carbon with its surrounding. Further developments in the field included the introduction of the calibration process in order to account for the fluctuations of the 14C/12C ratio in the atmosphere through time, and the use of mass spectrometry (MS) to arrive at more precise measurements using smaller samples (Bayliss 2009). The most recent important addition to the 14C dating methodology is the use of Bayesian modelling (Bronk Ramsey 2009) - a series of statistical tools which help to incorporate additional information (e.g. archaeological, historical, textual) into the absolute chronology, effectively reducing the errors of the radiocarbon dates.
For more than a century now, chronologies of the Mesopotamian civilisations were devised using primarily historical (written accounts) and archaeological methods (development of material culture). Although the need for the inclusion of scientific methods into the construction of absolute chronologies was recognised decades ago (Mellaart 1979; Bruins & Mook 1989), relatively few improvements in this direction have been made. Radiocarbon dating of Mesopotamian material is problematic for a number of reasons: