Hot take: I used to think carbon dating was the final word on artifact age.

For years on digs, if the carbon-14 results said something was 2,000 years old, that was the answer. Then on a site near Tucson, we found pottery styles that clearly matched a 1,500-year-old culture, but the carbon date from charcoal in the same layer kept coming back older. I had to learn to trust the material culture evidence over a single lab number. Has anyone else had a find where the typology and the science just didn't match up?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_terry1mo ago

Ever date something that was clearly lying about its age? My grad school thesis almost went down because a "medieval" piece of charcoal was just some old wood reused by a guy in the 1600s.

amy3021mo ago

Honestly, is it ever a perfect match? The science gives you a number, but the stuff around it tells the real story. Seems like you just ran into the old "heirloom wood" problem, which happens all the time. It's not that the science is wrong, it's that the sample had its own history before it hit the dirt. So yeah, trusting the pottery over a single date just sounds like good archaeology to me.