Radiocarbon dating works for three main reasons:

• Carbon-14 has a usable half-life of 5730 years.
• ^(14)C is relatively common and appears in regular ratios.
• Organic things continue to incorporate carbon from the atmosphere until they die.

None of these apply to silicon.

Silicon-32, the most stable radioactive isotope, has a half-life of 150 years. Carbon dating is reliable for around 10 half-lives, or between 50-60 kya. Afterwards, only .01% of the original ^(14)C is left; the rest has decay^(ed) into 12C. If you start with^( .)1 g o 14C, you'd be dealing with micrograms, at which point the effects of contamination or error would result in hugely different r^(es)ults. 32Si would reach that point after only 1500-2000 years.

Technically, radioactive Si exists in nature, but not in sufficient quantities to acknowledge. ^(14)C is constantly being produced by solar radiation in the atmosphere. The ratio of atmospheric ^(14)C to ^(12)C varies across time and space, but so long as we know that ratio we can calibrate for it.

Most importantly, carbon dating gives us a useful date: the date on which the organism died and stopped incorporating carbon into its body. A hypothetical "silicon dating" would not give us any such date, since the silicon isn't absorbed into the rock.

This does present some theoretical issues, what archaeologists call the "old wood" problem. If I date a piece of burnt bone I found in a hearth, I can be reasonably certain that the date I get, i.e. the date the animal died, is essentially the date the site's residents used it. You can't leave a butchered animal sitting around forever. Let's say I also find the collapsed roof of the building. It's reasonable that this lumber was harvested two-hundred years before the hearth was used: perhaps the building is historic and was in continuous use, or perhaps the wood was scavenged from an older building. If I date that wood, I can get results from long before the bone, even though it's clear that both the hearth and the roof were used at the same time.

Now, there *are* ways to date inorganic things. As a ceramics specialist, I'm most familiar with thermoluminescence (TL) dating. When exposed to sunlight, radioactive elements, or heat, crystalline minerals trap electrons in their complex molecular lattices. Heating these substances releases the electrons, "emptying" them. As they sit in the ground they acquire more electrons. If we heat them again, they release that energy. Comparing the expected amount to the actual amount can tell us when that object was last heated. This is obviously useful for ceramics, since the firing process heats the minerals in the clay sufficiently, but can also be used for stone artifacts that are heat-treated during production, or even for rocks that were part of an oven or fire ring.