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INTRODUCTION
The Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC) Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory was first established in the 1960s at the University of Glasgow and the first significant publication arising from the laboratory's research was published in Nature (Walton and Baxter 1968). In 1986, the laboratory was relocated to the Scottish Universities Research and Reactor Centre (SURRC, subsequently renamed SUERC) in East Kilbride, where radiometric analysis by liquid scintillation spectrometry was undertaken until the implementation of AMS14C dating in 1998. The AMS graphite preparation system was set up with the help and guidance of the NSF-Arizona AMS Facility at the University of Arizona, where the prepared samples and standards were initially sent for14C measurement. Following the installation of a National Electrostatics Corporation 5MV tandem AMS instrument at SUERC in 2003, the radiocarbon laboratory, in collaboration with AMS laboratory staff, have been undertaking14C AMS analyses (Xu et al. 2004; Naysmith et al. 2010). This capability was subsequently increased in 2007 with the establishment of a National Electrostatics Corporation 250kV single-stage AMS instrument. To date, approximately 27,00014C ages have been measured by the AMS facility and, currently, around 3500-4000 unknown-age samples are measured annually. A range of sample types is processed in the laboratory from the disciplines of archaeology, environmental science, forensic science, ecology, and the petrochemical (biofuel) industry. In this paper, we provide detailed laboratory procedures for sample submission, logging of samples into our custom-designed database (Tripney et al. 2014), pretreatment of a range of organic and inorganic sample types, sample combustion/hydrolysis and CO2 graphitization, AMS analysis and data reduction, associated stable isotope measurements, data handling processes, and Bayesian analysis.
SAMPLE SUBMISSION
Sample submission forms and dating certificates have been maintained for all radiometric samples measured at the SUERC Radiocarbon Laboratory since 1965. From 1998, with the introduction of AMS, an additional electronic record of all AMS samples was introduced in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. At the point of receiving a sample into the laboratory, each sample is designated a specific laboratory number beginning with the prefix GU- to signify processing at the SUERC Radiocarbon Laboratory. This is the defined number for the sample during the course...