Dating (scientifically, not romantically) (Pre-History)

[Pete Jones]

If there's a chronology problem in the first millennium AD, then where does that leave radiocarbon dating? Or vice versa?

Presumably, the radiocarbon dates match the dates provided by the soft science scholars, like paleographers, philologists, and linguists. Or at least they're close enough for everyone to get along.

But if there are no Dark Ages, and if the first millennium was 700 years shorter (like Gunnar Heinsohn says), then none of the hard-science dates should match the soft-science dates.

Right? I feel like I'm missing something.

[Mick Harper]

You're missing the adjustment tables.

I haven't checked lately but there used to be a system for converting carbon dates to actual dates. This was found to be necessary early doors because for a few hundred years carbon-14 molecules weren't decaying at the same rate as their brothers and sisters everywhere else in the universe. They have not informed us as to why because carbon is one of the 'dumb' elements in the Periodic Table.

Though not so dumb as to have a whole branch of academia, organic chemistry, devoted to studying it.

[Pete Jones]

I'll look into it and try to figure the adjustment tables out.

But on first blush, it seems like if you have to add an adjustment, it is because you are getting multiple dates from the raw test. And you have to adjust them because they don't agree with your paleography or your philology or whatever.

You know that Julius Caesar was 2,000 years ago, therefore if the date doesn't say 2,000 years ago, you need an adjustment.

But that's 100% circular. Or am I still missing it?

[Boreades]

The Hallstatt Plateau

This was something I stumbled on by chance. At first glance, you might wonder : "What's that, something to do with Hallstatt in Austria?" If you did, don't worry, I thought the same; but we'd both be wrong. It’s a chuffing great big (and euphemistically named) problem in Radiocarbon Dating.

[Pete Jones]

I know what I'll be asking AI about for the next several hours

[Mick Harper]

As I understand it, they were finding all the dates were out by c. 500 years so, since they knew the real historical dates and carbon dating was a very young science, it was agreed the carbon dates must be systemically askew for a reason that would presumably emerge as the 'more research is needed' flag was run up the flagpole.

Since carbon decay specific to that era was of no conceivable interest to chemists, that research was never undertaken and the tables could take care of the anomalies.

It may be so entrenched by now that the adjustment is done routinely at the lab, hence the historians and archaeologists get their dates without asterisks and there isn't anyone left in their ranks that would know there were any to begin with. And both science and the humanities can travel serenely on.

Though if this is true, and I'm not swearing to it, then the chemists should be royally shafted for breaking the Uniformitarian principles of the chemical universe (and science generally) and not doing anything about it. The historians and archaeologists can be acquitted of dereliction of duty.

[Mick Harper]

Dear Mr Boreades
The first hundred pages of Revisionist Historiography is devoted to this problem.
Yours sincerely
M J Harper
Author
Revisionist Historiography.

[Pete Jones]

While Ive read Mick's book and I remember that he uses Peter James' Greek Dark Ages book as the jumping-off point, I don't remember the details.

Just to take a stab, it seems that the radiocarbon daters have a mainstream chronology in hand, and they know where/when different artefacts are SUPPOSED to come from. But when they date things that they think are 400-800BC, they can get no difference. So far, so good (I hope).

So the Halstatt Plateau is interpreted by them as an INCREASE in Carbon-14, which caused their nice Carbon Curve to stop mapping onto their nice mainstream chronology.

But it might just be that the Carbon is perfectly flat because time hasn't changed at all (the chronology has added phantom years). The expected Carbon curve disappears (because it is measuring a single moment in time)?

But if you don't realize that time has "stopped", an unchanging amount of Carbon will look like an increase because the time-side of the equation isn't moving?

I just exhausted the small portion of my brain that can think abstractly about numbers.

[Mick Harper]

You've got the picture except that the time when time stood still varies depending on the academic history and archaeology of different areas. It can be as short as three hundred years or as long as seven hundred, and may be applied en bloc anywhere in the general period 500 to 1500 BC.

[Wile E. Coyote]