A protocol for using attenuated total reflection Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy for pre-screening ancient bone collagen prior to radiocarbon dating.

This pre-screening protocol can serve as a fast, concise and inexpensive pre-screening tool for determining relative degrees of preservation before collagen extraction and subsequent 14 C dating. The screening power based on the machine learning techniques can be further improved by accumulating the FTIR spectral data of bones.