44th Annual Meeting – Research and Technical Studies, May 17, "Characterizing the Age of Ancient Egyptian Manuscripts through micro-Raman Spectroscopy" by Sarah Goler

This is another session that I tweeted (@taradkennedy), so not a long post, but enough to give you the gist at least.
Ms. Goler was using micro-Raman spectroscopy for dating of Egyptian manuscript material.This is super cool because normally we’d have to take a sample of a manuscript and do carbon dating in order to determine a date of an unknown. With this method, we don’t!
So, how does it work? Essentially measurements are taken of the carbon black ink on a particular manuscript using micro-Raman spectroscopy. Using the difference in the dominant peak heights in the spectrograph with ink samples where the date is known, ratios are plotted and graphed to show dates:

Height ratio between peaks D & G and document date ranges
Height ratio between peaks D & G and document date ranges

So, the more plots you have, the more dates you have; and the more dates you have, the easier it is to determine the date range of an unknown manuscript.
To test that this would work, Ms. Goler analyzed a manuscript where she didn’t know the date range, but the librarian/ curator did. Using this method, she was able to date the manuscript within a 70 year range!
Got the date right +/- 70 years. That's pretty damn good and safer for the object than carbon dating.
Got the date right +/- 70 years. That’s pretty damn good and safer for the object than carbon dating.

It was nondestructive in that the energy level of the laser used didn’t “burn up” the ink sample. One of the issues that a conservator from the University of Michigan else mentioned during the Q&A portion was that in order to get the peak response that Ms. Goler got, she would destroy the sample. Since my experience with Raman spectroscopy is zero, I can’t really speculate why Ms. Goler was successful and this other woman from U of M was not.
I did think this is a really promising technique, provided I understood the content correctly. If people have edits or corrections, be sure to comment below!