Long follows a long succession of proceedings of International Radiocarbon Conferences. This volume lives up to the high standards of quality seen in previous publications of the distinctive red-colored issues of Radiocarbon. Previous meetings at Trondheim, Dubrovnik, Seattle, Heidelberg, and elsewhere all produced recognizably valuable proceedings volumes. The 14th Znternational Radiocarbon Conference is no exception. The volume covers all new and important advances in 14C dating over the 3-year period since the previous conference. The Tucson meeting was the first that many scientists from eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union attended. The audience for this volume includes anyone who is actively engaged in radiocarbon research either from the standpoint of the method itself or as a user of 14C dates.
Following a rather "flamboyant" and typically spontaneous account of a typical day in a radiocarbon facility (by Meyer Rubin), the volume is divided into 6 sections. While the authors are too numerous to name in full, the individual sections include sample preparation and measurement, applied isotope geochemistry, global 14C production, paleoclimatology, archaeological applications, and notes and comments. Some important highlights in the long list of articles include 14C dating of bone with a view to improving pretreatment of samples, analysis of background contamination, and other aspects of sample preparation. New information about high sensitivity 14C dating of samples in the 50,000-70,000 year B.P. range (by Austin Long and R. Kalin) will be of interest to researchers using conventional liquid scintillation counters without isotopic enrichment. Other articles in this section involve quantification of gamma flux in 14C laboratories, background contamination, the future of gas counting, and minisampling, which is valuable more to practitioners of the art than to users. Other articles in Section I, which account for more than half the volume length, include a number devoted to advances in AMS, especially the new facilities at Purdue University and