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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Komorikid wrote: |
Then I guess all the extant papyri texts from the 3-4th Century BC are clever forgeries and every writer who mentions Homer from Thucydides to Cicero are also bogus. |
Yes.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | My understanding is that it is still the principal technique used by Archaeos to date the world around us. |
Quite right. And so it should be. It is also AE's hope and joy because it is a paradigm that is outside the control of archaeologists. Or so we had thought... |
Unfortunately, radio carbon-dating is calibrated by historians.
It's useless.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Keimpe wrote: | | Ishmael wrote: | | Homer is a modern text. |
How modern? |
Go ye and discover.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| DPCrisp wrote: | Don't we have a separate thread for Troy?
Even if it turns out the Beaker People are the Trojans, the question here is where they came from at the ushering-in of the Bronze Age. |
Yes please. Let's do try to keep this stuff from spreading.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Unfortunately, radio carbon-dating is calibrated by historians. |
That's not entirely fair. At least some calibration data comes from dating tree rings.
There seems to be a growing trend (on telly) in saying carbon date ranges combined with other archaeological data or insights enables them to focus more precisely on the actual dates. It seems the archaeos/historians are beginning to interfere more than they have before.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Unfortunately, radio carbon-dating is calibrated by historians. |
I'm not wholly sure. When you send your bone off to the Oxford Radiological Lab (or whatever) the bloke doing the work is a radiological chemist (or whatever they call him). What I don't know is whether this dude sticks the bone in his whatsit, reads off the figure and sends the result off to the archaeologist.
OR the dude sticks the bone in his whatsit, reads off the figure, makes the necessary recallibration from the bit of paper stuck up on the lab wall which tells him how archaeologists demand the number be recallibrated and sends the result off to the archaeologist.
By no means. For lots of things it is highly useful for us all. For some things it is merely highly useful to orthodox archaeologists.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| That's not entirely fair. At least some calibration data comes from dating tree rings. |
Since tree ring dating is itself subject to some degree of historical interference I wonder how objective this is. In theory the whole matter could be resolved by chopping down a ten thousand year old tree and radio dating its various bits. I wonder how close to this gold standard anyone has ever come...and whether the results were published?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | Unfortunately, radio carbon-dating is calibrated by historians. |
That's not entirely fair. At least some calibration data comes from dating tree rings. |
Dendochronology -- which is also calibrated by historians. It's a big empty circle.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | In theory the whole matter could be resolved by chopping down a ten thousand year old tree and radio dating its various bits. |
If by Radio-Dating you mean Radio-Carbon Dating, it is my understanding that, the only result would be a date for the day you chopped down the tree. Radio-Carbon dating measures how much radioactivity remains in the subject post-mortem, and projects a date for end-of-life based on a theoretically universal rate of decay and an assumed starting level.
It's completely useless. Completely useless.
Future scientists will look back on our time and laugh. Always remember that.
It remains for us only to anticipate what it is they'll be laughing at.
I'm certain the cult of radio-carbon dating will be one of those things.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| Ishmael wrote: | | DPCrisp wrote: | Don't we have a separate thread for Troy?
Even if it turns out the Beaker People are the Trojans, the question here is where they came from at the ushering-in of the Bronze Age. |
Yes please. Let's do try to keep this stuff from spreading. |
| Ishmael wrote: | | Komorikid wrote: |
Then I guess all the extant papyri texts from the 3-4th Century BC are clever forgeries and every writer who mentions Homer from Thucydides to Cicero are also bogus. |
Yes. |
And let's please keep your Meta-scepticism on its own thread where it is getting the attention it deserves.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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What thread is that Komi? I don't know what you are talking about. You must be thinking of another Web site.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| Ishmael wrote: | | What thread is that Komi? I don't know what you are talking about. You must be thinking of another Web site. |
All the more reason to keep it there.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| it is my understanding that, the only result would be a date for the day you chopped down the tree. |
Well I daresay somebody will know but I think the decay starts when the carbon is no longer being replaced. True this is normally when the plant dies but in the case of trees I think the heart of the tree is dead and only each successive layer is actually 'alive'. So it ought to show the middle as being ten thousand years old.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| What I don't know is whether this dude sticks the bone in his whatsit, reads off the figure and sends the result off to the archaeologist. OR... makes the necessary recallibration... and sends the result off to the archaeologist. |
Well, I haven't seen any examples lately, but they used to bandy about both calibrated and uncalibrated results, as if the lab coats give out the raw figures and the archaeos interpret them. But why use both? Because there is/was still so much reliance on results published before the calibration was worked out?
You get the feeling they enjoy saying to Alternos "no, you ignoramus, that's an uncalibrated figure... and BP means before 1950".
| Since tree ring dating is itself subject to some degree of historical interference I wonder how objective this is. |
So do I, but it's not so straightforward to say
| Dendochronology -- which is also calibrated by historians. It's a big empty circle |
You can't really count a hundred rings and say "let's call that 75". There may be problems with continuity of the tree ring record, but there is also a large measure of objectivity. We can't dismiss it without knowing what they've done.
| I think the decay starts when the carbon is no longer being replaced. True this is normally when the plant dies but in the case of trees I think the heart of the tree is dead and only each successive layer is actually 'alive'. So it ought to show the middle as being ten thousand years old. |
Correct. The calibration is to adjust for the not-in-fact-constant starting levels and is done by carbon dating the wood of the rings themselves.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| You can't really count a hundred rings and say "let's call that 75". There may be problems with continuity of the tree ring record, but there is also a large measure of objectivity. We can't dismiss it without knowing what they've done. |
I agree with you and disagree with Ishmael on this point. Dendro is objective and useful when it comes to the pure counting of rings. Trouble comes, as you imply, when you start adding rings from one tree to rings in another. It's clearly subjective (though still a rational enterprise) when you've got a suspected fifteen hundred year old slab of wood and are trying to match up its rings to younger and older reference rings. That's why I said that only a ten thousand year old tree would do the trick.
And it does it so completely that it is interesting in an AE sort of way just why they either haven't done it or declined to publicise the results if they have done it.
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