This meant that the dating could be done without substantially reducing the physical archive of the site.

The bones could be sampled, dated, and returned to the museum collection with most of their material intact.

The science was minimally destructive.

The broader AMS revolution transformed what was possible in archaeology: ancient DNA analysis, now routinely conducted on tiny samples, was enabled by techniques developed alongside AMS work.

The dating of previously undatable materials — rare organic artifacts, human remains from key early American sites — became possible.

The chronological framework of North American prehistory, built laboriously from conventional radiocarbon dates on charcoal and organic material throughout the mid-twentieth century, was refined, corrected, and extended by the precision and sample-size flexibility that AMS provided.