Radiocarbon dating of straw fragments in the plasters of st. philip church in archaeological site hierapolis of phrygia (denizli, turkey)

Absolute dating of plasters and mortars clearly represents a key information to study important structures and buildings that may have undergone a difficult story starting from their construction. This is for instance the case of the architectures in the archaeological site of Hierapolis (Denizli, Turkey). However, when discussing about the possibility to apply radiocarbon (C-14) dating, in this site the presence of different sources of contaminants, due to the geological and geochemical conditions and to the used raw materials, prevents the binder dating. As an alternative, we thus decided to focus on the small fragments of straw that had been used as additives in the mortar/plaster matrices. The fragments were identified, selected and dated using a C-14 experimental set-up specifically optimized for microgram-sized samples. The obtained results were satisfying, even though the measured C-14 ages also pointed out some possible criticalities in dating such small samples collected from a carbonaceous matrix.