The development of dating with radiocarbon (14C) by W. F. Libby and his colleagues, and its immediate application to archaeological objects from Mexico, aroused the interest of Mexican archaeological community, especially from the Prehistory Direction of the INAH. Joining efforts, the Institute of Physic of UNAM and INAH set up the first 14C laboratory in 1954. Augusto Moreno, who had worked and learned the technique with Libby in Chicago, was named the researcher in charge of this laboratory. We present the chronology of the project to install the first 14C laboratory in Mexico and some of the archaeological research projects that used the 14C dating technique carried out in Mexico in the 1960s.

The North Sea is considered a unique heritage site that yielded a huge amount of zoological and archaeological data. More than 200 palaeozoological and archaeological fossil bone samples from the North Sea bed are dated by 14C. About 2/3 of these dated bones are Pleistocene in age; the majority of the bones are from extinct species (in particular woolly mammoth); about 1/3 of the sample date to the Holocene. The presented dataset is important in its kind, but interpretation is limited because of a lack of context of the finds. The stable isotopes (13C, 15N) of the dated samples provide additional information on palaeoenvironmental conditions and dietary habits in the past. We present primarily a Groningen list of data; a few fossils dated in other laboratories are included for completeness.