Members of a multidisciplinary team assembled by archaeologists at Keble College, Oxford, are pooling their expertise to take advantage of the latest scientific advances in the study of relics Oxford’s particle accelerator is a beast of a machine, taking up a cold, neon-lit room on the ground floor of a building in the university’s laboratory quarter. With its pipes and dials and huge steel drum, the accelerator works on the same principle as the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland, which scientists are using as part of their research into the Big Bang and the origins of the universe.The much smaller machine at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit is being used to find answers to big questions of a different kind. It has been employed to discover the age of relics