Absolute dating of lead carbonates in ancient cosmetics by radiocarbon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Lead carbonate is one of the major compounds of art and archeology used as an ingredient in paint and cosmetics since Antiquity. Accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating is usually applied to organic remains. Here we extend radiocarbon dating to lead carbonate, an inorganic material. We demonstrate that lead carbonates can be dated. We also show that natural and manufactured make-up powders can be discriminated by radiocarbon. We find that cerussite used for cosmetics was a natural mineral during the Egyptian Kingdom and then a synthesized compound manufactured by the ancient Greeks. Furthermore, we confirm that phosgenite was artificially produced by the Egyptians about 3500 years ago. Our results confirm the expertize of ancient Egyptians and Greeks in the chemical synthesis of cosmetics. The detection of radiocarbon in lead carbonate holds great promise for art history and provides a new tool for the authentication of paintings by dating the lead white pigment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".