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Physics and Archaeology
Guinnessy writes: "In 1960 Willard Frank Libby won a Nobel Prize for his work on radiocarbon dating, a technique that truly revolutionize archaeology. Now Physics Today magazine has an article describing how new methods are yielding more accurate dates for our prehistoric ancestors, profoundly affecting our understanding of the past. Neat stuff."
Before the radio-carbon dating and the physics of glow curves and AMS testing and all the other modern techniques were available, archaeologists were digging in the dirt looking for "old-stuff" to examine. It's a natural human behaviour, a curiousity to know where we came from.
So what did people use in the old days? Their eyes and their brains. Observations and an understanding of basic anatomy, history and geology are tools that you can take anywhere, don't require an expensive lab, and never need new batteries.
Today's technology may be nailing down more accurate dating, but human experience out in the field is still you're best place to start in an archaeological dig. While the two should compliment each other, the people who rely on machines to do all the work for them don't really understand what it means to be an archaeologist.
We developed archaeology without any carbon dating. We had to use anthropological methods tofigure out what the meaning of a bunch of stuff in a dig was, and where it came from.
Carbon dating is a wonderful technology - it dates stuff within a range of a century or so. It enables us to confirm hypothesis made by other methods.
A more rigid and absolute dating technology would probably enable archaeologists to fill in many of the gaps in current knowledge.
I worry about too much reliance on an absolute technology, though. Even if you take a bore of soil and can tell the exact day when each item fell into it, you still learn nothing about trade routes, cultures, mythologies, ancient lifestyles, etc.
This is where anthropology, an inexact science, must take the lead.
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One thing this article fails to mention is that when these dating techniques are used, they often give wildly varying results for a single sample often with a spread of 2 orders of magnitude!!! Another interesting point is that all the radioactive dating methods are based on critical assumptions about our earth which in some cases (Carbon-14 in the atmosphere) have been proven wrong. I'm _not_ a creationist - I believe that if anything the creation story is meant to be an allegory of some sort. So I don't pay much attention to creationist rants. I have read several good books which address these issues, particularly as the related to evolution and archaeology. On is: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (thats a review of it). It discusses in scientific detail what is wrong with the radioactive dating methods both theoretically and in their application. I highly recommend the book even though I am not truly qualified to assess its arguments (IANAS(cientist)).
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Our lab here at Purdue, PRIME Lab, is a great example of this, retooling an older tandem accelerator lab for a new use as funding for nuclear physics began to dry up, and other similar facilities around the country closed. We've even got one of the accelerators with the highest energies of any AMS facility in the US by reusing the facility in this way.
First paragraph in the article... and already they've lost my (suspension of dis)belief....
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==> Traditional archaeology has not been a field that suffers science easily. Only gradually have archaeologists accepted physics as a tool for archaeological research. Perhaps as a result, the physicists who work in archaeology, their methods, and their theories, are neither well known nor numerous. Archaeometry, as the wider field of scientific archaeology is known, has no Heisenbergs or Einsteins, uncertainty principles or relativity theories. The only physical discovery to truly revolutionize archaeology has been radiocarbon dating.
Physicists have developped ground-based RADAR technology and Echo-location technologies which are having a profound impact on the archaeological world.
Take a look at: http://www.exn.ca/inc/demo.asp?Video=exn20011009-
(Windows media player format, sorry.)
These RADAR/SONAR devices have drastically reduced the time it takes to locate archaeological sites, and yet they don't even mention it until the end of the article. After having clearly stated that "The only physical discovery to truly revolutionize archaeology has been radiocarbon dating."
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
destroyed. So, when creating the Earth, God used existing materials.
So who made god?
And if you can accept the fact that he/she always existed, why can't you accept the fact that the universe always existed without him/her?
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One thing the article didn't really go into that I found interesting is how carbon 14 dating was found to be inaccurate. It had been assumed that C-14 decayed at a constant rate. However, a guy named Schulman studying the Bristlecone Pine trees in the White Mountains of California discovered that C-14 dates didn't match the tree ring dates. Subsequently, tree rings between living and dead bristlecones have been used to construct accurate dating back 9000 years, and it has been determined that C-14 rates do change. Read more about it on the Inyo National Forest page.
Yes, this is kinda silly and kinda offtopic, but I can't be bothered to do some proper searching on the subject.
When were the oldest pyramids in Egypt built - really?
I saw a special on Discovery a year ago, and they said that carbon dating was estimating the pyramids to be (IIRC) between 4 and 11 thousand years old. Not too accurate, is it? Can someone explain, why there is so much doubt when estimating the age of pyramids, when they could set the age of the Egyptian pharaoh's tomb to 5730 years? And have any of these new techniques set some more accurate dates?
-Kraft
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