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My uncle retired from digging sites in Turkey and dropped a bomb on me about pottery shards
He said most of what we think about dating layers is just a best guess. He pointed at a pile of broken jars in his garage and said half the timelines in textbooks came from one guy's notebook from 1922. That hit different because I always thought carbon dating was solid. He says context is everything but the context gets wrecked by looters or bad records. Has anyone else heard this from actual field workers?
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singh.harper4mo ago
Whoa hold on, I gotta push back a little here! Carbon dating is way more solid than your uncle is giving it credit for. It's not just based on some old guy's notebook from the 1920s. Scientists have been refining it for decades with tree rings and known historical dates to make the calibration curves really accurate. Yeah, looters mess stuff up sometimes, but that's why proper digs have strict methods to keep the context clean. Your uncle might be jaded from working with crummy sites, but the science behind carbon dating is tested and proven across thousands of labs, not just one guy's hunch.
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morgan.jason4mo ago
Trust the guy who actually dug stuff up, not some lab tech calibrating machines.
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brian_taylor154mo ago
I mean that notebook thing really stuck with me too, I used to trust carbon dating way more.
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