Had a talk with a dig supervisor in New Mexico that made me worry about how we date sites

I was volunteering on a small Pueblo excavation last summer near Santa Fe, nothing big, just helping with screening. The supervisor pulled me aside one afternoon and pointed to a piece of charcoal we had bagged from a hearth layer. He said that one sample was going to give us a date 200 years older than the pottery we found in the same level, and that most crews just ignore the charcoal when it doesn't match their story. It made me wonder how many published dates are actually cherry-picked. Has anyone else run into this kind of selective reporting on a real dig?

3 comments

3 Comments

daniel_cooper344d ago

So they're basically just picking the dating method that fits their narrative? Classic.

williamhenderson4d ago

Right there with you @daniel_cooper34, it's frustrating to watch them ignore methods that don't fit the story they already decided on. A 10,000 year window shouldn't be this hard to pin down.

betty_perry244d ago

I noticed the same thing with that study on ancient tools last year, they just tossed out the carbon dates that didn't line up.