[en] Very soon after the discovery of radioactivity, measurements of the heavy radioactive elements existing in nature were undertaken to determine the age of rocks (Rutherford 1904), but only when Professor Willard Libby in an evening lecture during the first United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva in 1955 described how he and his research team had evolved the carbon-14 dating technique did research on radioactive dating receive a real impetus. Since that time laboratories in many countries have made rapid progress and geologists, geophysicists, geochemists and archaeologists have joined forces with nuclear scientists to perfect the techniques and widen the range of its applications