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No, I cannot. Carbon-14 dating is a much specialised skill in its own right, performed by instrumental scientists. But conservators need to study it because otherwise we might, by careless treatment of samples, invalidate them, rendering them unfit for testing.
E
There are three aspects to conservation.
Preventative conservation
Firstly, we can create the right environment for the artefact to slow down its degradation. So that, ideally, the artefact will not need to be treated individually in the laboratory. There are many agents of decay. But the main factors that we are concerned with are light, including ultraviolet radiation, humidity, pollutants, insects and moulds.
Have you wondered why buildings such as the Hong Kong Museum of Art in Tsim Sha Tsui have wonderful urban views but only a small number of windows to enjoy them from? It is because the strength of the sun varies throughout the day and the particular season, and conservators prefer many museum artefacts to be limited in terms of the amount of light that they are exposed to, and certainly not to damaging ultraviolet light. Conservators joke that they would prefer the galleries inside museums to be pitch black; low levels of lighting are usually the result of conservators trying to prolong an artefact's existence.
Humidity is complicated and harder to control, metals need humidity to rust but if we dry the air too much, composite items will crack as they dry up. Keeping an artefact at a low state of humidity in the tropics requires a high degree of maintenance. High humidity causes many artefacts to go mouldy and become more susceptible to insect attack. A rapidly changing humidity is very damaging to wood and ivory artefacts; it can make them crack or in the case of ivory even explode.
There are many types of pollutant and these can damage different types of artefacts. The pollutant may come from the external
I [Hon. Ed. - A long-lived naturally occurring radioactive carbon isotope of mass 14, used in carbon dating and as a tracer in biochemistry.]