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Atlantis: Discovered at Last?
Henry G. writes "The BBC is reporting that recent satellite pictures may show the location of the fabled city of Atlantis, as described by Plato. It is in Southern Spain, though, and not on an island as is commonly believed. Here's an image of the concentric rings over the alleged area." This story has gotten a lot of submissions; it's worth noting that it's also shown up off Cyprus, or near Cuba, or is Crete, or... It is worth noting that that Ubar was found this way.
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...who can't see any rings in that photo?
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
...where's Patrick Duffy?
If I squit really hard I can see the face of Bin Laden, or Saddam or whoever it is this week!
Of course, it certainly would be cool if it was the real deal!
Hey I see it now, its a pony! No wait....its a mule....OH I see it now, it's a city. How silly of me!
Have you metaroderated recently?
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
It's probably just pareidolia. They know what they are looking for, so they see it in highly ambiguous data. Sure it might be Atlantis, but I remain skeptical until they can produce much more unequivocal evidence.
Here's an image of the concentric rings over the alleged area.
Atlantis? Is that a new filter for the Gimp or something?...you can clearly see Noah's Ark perched about three-quarters of the way up.
And the skeleton of a dove.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This site doesn't need "satelites" to prove atlantis exists
But these days everyone's finding Atlantis
Or is anyone else having Heraldo and the vaults of Capone flashbacks?
(we found it! we found it! Oh, crap...)
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Why could he not have just whipped out what ever passed for hand held GPS at the time and provided map co-ordinates ? He might have been a decent philosopher but he was a crap travel writer.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Patrick Duffy played in a short-lived tv series in the 70's called Man from Atlantis.
Let's go there with our metal detectors and see what we can find!
Finders keepers?
This article reminds me of the great Lucasgame Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
t s/indy4_7.jpg
:)
Screeny here: http://www.sebelinteractive.de/scummvm/images/sho
I hope there will be something interesting to find down there
This is the sig that says NI (again)
It might be important to note that the sory of Atlantis could and is most likly just that a story. Plato like Homer was a great story teller, he was also had an great impact on many Academic Disciplines.
While Homers story of The Illiad was based on the real war that happened in Troy, we have no conclusive prof that an island of Atlantis existed. This discovery may provide evidence of the fabled city, but I won't hold my breath just yet.
-Ghost
I always thought that Santorini and its adjacent islands were "Atlantis": it was one big island,but it went pompeii and thus you get a big ring of smaller islands. They have excavated and found ancient stuff, of course, etc. Same with Crete. How far do you think the story of Atlantis travelled geographically?
stuff |
how do they confirm it is atlantis?
will they find a stone fragment with the words "downtown atlantis, exit 43" in ancient greek?
no seriously: how does a mythical city of unknown location be "proven" to be this old city versus that old city?
why can't their find of this ancient city stand on its own as exciting and important? why link it to a dubious unprovable myth?
it seems to me that there is no way to say either this city or that one is atlantis itself, or am i missing something
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Thats the lost city of R'lyeh...
It strikes me that there will be many cities lost to flooding throughout history. Just because they've found one sunken city doesn't mean that it's the same city Plato was talking about, surely?
IIRC, the Greeks attributed their stories of Atlantis to a travelling Egyptian. So even the Greeks got the information second hand, and probably wouldn't have been able to uniquely identify Atlantis.
would be if we discovered a very old, very advanced civilization that threw historians a curveball. For example, what if some ancient civilization was just as advanced as us but nuked themselves out of existence? This could explain much: the gods of Greek mythology, etc. Just a thought.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
... the location of an allegorical tale to teach us the evils of materialism?
"This is the only place that seems to fit [Plato's] description," he told BBC News Online.
Except for its not being an island and all the other bits we ignored to make the data fit the model.
KFG
The Mediteranean Sea has been rising for as long as it's existed (it's essentially a big basin that's filling from the other water sources around it). Cities have been built on the coast of the Mediteranean for millenia.
If we call any sunken city in the Mediteranean "Atlantis", we'll never get any work done. There are just too many of them.
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Open mind, insert foot.
I think there was a error in the headline. It should read:
Atlantis: Discovered Again?
It makes the story more consistent with facts.
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virve
I can't make out rings nor rectangles in that
picture. But I clearly see a big cache of WMD in the lower left corner.
---- join dshield.org Distributed Intrusion Detec
I can see the face of Bin Laden
Let me guess: you're in the US Army and you are just trying to start this rumor in the hopes that you get relocated out of Iraq to the beautiful beaches of Spain, right?
Karma: NaN
If you're looking for something spesific, it's easy to find it.. our mind is good at recognisong patterns, even when they arn't there. Off course, this is what leads people to see cities om Mars, Lenin in their shower curtain and, in this cause, traces of Atlantis. It's called pareidolia, and it's more common than you might think.
PS: I urge everyone to visit the link and explore the site - it's a good read and quite interesting as well as funny.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
... this is just a PR stunt by the Sci Fi Channel to hype their new series, Stargate: Atlantis.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The original Antiquity article is here.
Aside from a great deal of speculation about correlations between Egyptian records, tales of the Peoples of the Sea, and a selective reading of the Dialogues, the only "data" the author points to are the satellite images which may be the remains of rectangular structures. Nothing in situ to indicate dating.
As there is almost certainly evidence of Bronze Age settlements practically anywhere one cares to dig along the Mediterranean coast of Spain, this article is roughly the equivalent of speculating that an unattributed burial in a 6th century Wessex tomb must necessarily be the remains of Arthur.
Trusted by cats.
Other similar headlines include:
/. stories starting to have tabloid feel?
Proof of Dark matter?
Cold Fusion Finally?
SCO's last gasp?
Is it just me, or are some
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
So, in near future we will have dozen places that claim to be Atlantis. Is this going to be as with Santa Claus. There are atleast ten different countries claiming to be Santa's home countries.
How do you define which is the real Atlantis? I bet there are many forgotten cities that distantly match description written almost 3000 years ago.
Can Atlantis be identified without a doubt? If so, then how?
It was believed to be a mythical place, thanks in great part to the Illiad, but it was eventually found.
The same could be said of some of the biblic places.
And who knows? We may find one day a place that inequivoably is identified as Atlantis.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.
There's a chain of islands called the Mid Atlantic ridge, which, if the water level were lowered 300-500 feet (as it was before the end of the ice age) would be a very large island. You could even call it an island continent.
Plato said atlantis was 9000 years before him, or about 11,500 years ago. We've only learned in the past couple of decades that almost exactly at that time, the mean temperature of the earth raised a significant amount in a short amount of time. If a bunch of ice (North America had a mile-thick layer of ice) melted all at once, and you lived on an island continent, it would seem that your island sank into the ocean.
Someday I'll be proven correct. I just know it.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Why can't these people get it through their heads thaty Atlantis, as recounted by Plato in Timaeas and Critias, is allegorical.
It has as much objective reality as More's Utopia and Butler's Erehwon. It even had the same purpose, to illustrate a philosophical point and "demonstrate" Plato's idea of an ideal society.
It just happened that Atlantis was a handy cultural peg to hang it off, somewhat like Avalon and Lyonesse is today for some people.
There have been numerous candidates for Atlantis, but the outstanding one, IMO, is Santorini.
That island, part of the of the Minoan civilisation, blew its top somewhat spectacularly, and was probably a contributory factor to the collapse of the Minoan, Mycenaean and Hittite empires, who just happened to be trading partners with the Egyptians at the time.
The Egyptians, being anal-retentive record keepers kept some records of this, and these, in garbled form, are probably what inspired Plato to use the island as the home for his ideal civilisation.
Given the effects of this massive explosion on the weather (shitty crops practically guaranteed throughout the region), which would have negatively effected the economies of the Mycenaeans and Hitties.
The loss of contact with the Minoans (who were in a decline at the time anyway, so this probably played a large part in finishing them off) would likely have pushed them over the edge as well. Both of those regions (the Anatolian Plateau and southern Greece) being somewhat marginal environments to start with, having low annual rainfall, poor and shallow soil, and high summer temperatures).
This probably would have made it into the Egyptian annals as something along the lines of "those Greek and Turkish bastards haven't turned up so far this year to hawk their tat, no great loss, but a bit of a pain in the arse. Also we have been having some really shitty weather this last year, on the plus side, the surf was wicked last summer. Wonder if they are related? - Amememhat"
This also would quite likely have been mythologised to a certain extent from the tales of survivors.
No need for the tortured logic and papering over the cracks here, it all depends on fairly well understood factors, a big fuck off explosion, the fragility of civilisations based on gift-giving economies and ties of obligation, especially in somewhat marginal environments, and a bit of garbling and mythologisation over the years.
Mix an ambitious philosopher looking for a name to hang an idea off, and Viola! a ready made myth for people to chase incessantly, and for con-men in the mould of Von Daniken and Hancock to make a good living off.
I thought the land mass under the South pole was Atlantis, the piece fits into the Pangea puzzle , and it is said to have landed up there when the poles revesed there polarity around the same time the great lakes , and the scotish lochs where formed since those two places used to be the poles, I saw it on National Geographic or Discovery a while back
Was Plato there? How does he know about Atlantis? If there was an Atlantean civilization during his era, why is his writings the first? You would think some king would have had a writing about it. And the final question: Do we really want to attempt to resurrect a civilization that Posiden (sp?) decided to sink? I mean come on - the dudes a God for crying out loud. We've seen the previews for "the day after tomorrow" now I know most of us don't want to see the movie - do we really want to see it enacted LIVE? Anyone? Anyone? (ok that was a few more questions) :)
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
It's /. so I'm too lazy to look at the article, but from the story I should point one thing:
As little as we know about alleged Atlantis, one thing is sure from Plato's tales -- Atlantis was beyond the Pilars of Hercules (Gibraltar Strait). So anything on the Atlantic, Pacific or Indian Ocean is a good candidate, whether it is in Amercia, Asia or Antarctic.
Anything on Mediterranean Sea, or Black Sea is NOT beyond the Pilars of Hercules.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
Plato's references to Atlantis, specifically, are basically a sequel to his Republic, which is in turn an idealized version of the Spartan state. The Republic is mostly about an anti-democratic reaction to the direction Athens chose to go. The Atlantis myth is essentially a way of describing early Athens as virtuously fighting against an outside invader. Plato was using his created myth, to quote a skeptic's article on this, as a "noble lie."
The specific physical characteristics being cited in this article are so ludicrously overgeneral that I'm amazed they don't have more than one match to go on. All you have to know is what the article says: "The features were originally spotted by Werner Wickboldt, a lecturer and Atlantis enthusiast who studied photographs from across the Mediterranean for signs of the city described by Plato." This is another Heinrich Schliemann. They'll be planting golden masks next.
(Hey, I've found another ancient city of Troy! It's an Anasazi settlement. Go ahead... prove it ain't. Or maybe Atlantis was on Santorini. Or was that Troy? Or Tyre. Yeah... Tyre.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Google can find several sites which endorse any loony theory. What's your point?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Michael Shermer's book "Why People Believe Weird Things" does a decent job of summing up the problem and how it works with ideas like this: People's minds are wired to look for patterns. They look for patterns that relate to other patterns they're familiar with, mostly, or those are the ones they think they see anyway. Show me a Rorschach blob, or a random scattering of data, and I'm going to try to figure out what it means. Faces on Mars! My fate, written in the tea leaves! Your character, in the lines on your palm! And so on.
In the case of Atlantis, though, it takes a special kind of thinking to ignore all the obvious political context for Plato -- his and his family's opposition to the way Athens had gone, the whole Republic-as-an-ideal-Sparta thing -- but to seize on the few physical details he describes for Atlantis. They're not missing the forest for the trees: they're imagining the forest where they imagine there's a tree. Based on two rectangles near some concentric circles, no less. Yow.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
It was originally thought that the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere was constant over time. It's been later found out that this is incorrect. In addition there is the 'hard water error' which affects results quite badly. However by correlating dendrochronology dates (very, very precise and accurate) with C-14 dates we have quite a refined system. C-14 dates are represented as a date with an error margin and percentage probability eg 10,000BP +/- 200years at 2 standard deviations.
C-14 isn't a fundemental principle of Archaeology. It's one of many tools that are used.
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I mean if he can pick out Atlantis from that one picture.. he should be able to find every hiding spot in Iraq..
The signs of it are EVERYWHERE, if you know what to look for!
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
There are "a lot of supposed sites for Atlantis. I would have to say this is one of the least faith inspiring "finding" I've seen.
Mythology being quite entertaining to me, I've read of most of the supposed sites. There is an island called Thera, located off the coast of Crete. It seems to me that if anything found so far is the fabled Atlantis, this is it. Archological digs show that they had both hot and cold running water, as well as a very advanced trade. Prior to the erruption, there was a circular cove around the island. There are significant enough similarities between Plato's Atlantis and Thera for there to be a very convincing arguement for this site. The disaster of the volcanic erruption would fit the timeframe of the other legends surrounding the survivors of Atlantis - for instance, the Spanish conquistadors that slayed the white-skinned men on the northwestern coast of Africa that claimed to be from such a society (I think? my memory is sketchy.)
I suspect people aren't making conclusive claims about Thera being Atlantis yet because there simply aren't enough interesting historical mysteries to get funding for. Atlantis is a pearl in almost everyone's eyes, thus people keep searching - finding various other interesting things - in the name of searching for Atlantis.
After all, once you've found all the easter eggs that they said there were, you're not going to want to keep looking, as it's not likely you'll find anything - or so you think.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
.. it is not in the Atlantic, it is not under water, but other than that it is Atlantis just like Plato described it?
(I'm not criticizing you here...)
So how long would you last in your field if you made a huge claim with only the weakest, unsubstantiated data? This Atlantis claim is based solely on one poorly defined image and absolutely NO physical evidence from the ground. The whole story of Atlantis is based on the assumed infallibility of Plato, as if Plato were incapable of being mistaken or believing a bogus folktale.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I'd say that the use of concentric rings would be relatively common in very early settlements as a basic form of self defense. Hill forts with circular earthen walls are found in England and Ireland. It is simply the shortest and simplest wall you can make around a site. I wouldn't be surprised if prehistoric settlers in Spain and England were in contact and used similar construction styles. To say that this is an automatic sign that it is Atlantis is like saying everyone who wears a baseball cap must be on a major league baseball team.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Let me guess: you're in the US Army and you are just trying to start this rumor in the hopes that you get relocated out of Iraq to the beautiful beaches of Spain, right?
Those would be the beautiful beaches of Andalusia, infidel swine!
Archaeology is not a science, certainly not an 'arcane science'. It's a discipline which employs (amongst other things) scientific techniques, such as C-14 dating.
I almost belived you were an Archeolog up until you wrote that..
For something to be a science, you have to be able to do studies, using methods based on theories, and to get results that can be independently verified by repeating the study by peer scientists.
Archeology is exactly that ..
If you want an example of something that is not science, take psychoanalysis as an example. It's not even a theory, and as such, can't be disproofed. Everything is based on two subjects of Freud that he found interesting, and used to get him out of his financial troubles.
I'm sure he is laughing hysterically in his grave.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Plato's work describes a rather agressive and widespread empire. Hindu legends of the Deva Nahusha also tell of a similar, widespread empire around the same time. Atlantis is not mentioned by that name anywhere outside of Plato's work, but strikingly similar entities are told of in other place under different names.
There's lots of other myths and legends in other cultures around the world that seem to point to some sort of largish civilization at the time Atlantis was supposed to have peaks. No UFOs, no advanced technology, no silliness... just *something* that is, for the most part, still undiscovered. It's not a big deal, really. So the dawn of civilization gets pushed back a bit. So what? It'd be interesting. Look at Caral in Peru. That discovery pushed back the birth of city life and organized farming in the "New World" a full 1000 years in one shot.
As for the features being spotted by an Atlantis enthusiast, well, use scientific method here: who else is looking for it? ;-)
--- Ban humanity.
That "Atlantis" referred to most of Indonesia, under the South China Sea, since it was a full continent rather than a bunch of islands during the last ice age. It's pretty novel, and I can't recall any other work putting forth this theory (ie, anything on TLC - heh).
A Brazillian Professor has a pretty informative site about this where he talks about his research. Since they added a forum, it seems that more other people than I realized have been following this as well.
How does this work, you say? Well, if you consider the mediterranian philosophy of flat earths and rings going out, they considered the "Atlantic Ocean" to be a sort of "world ocean", not the specific ocean we call it today. Plus, there are a whole other number of Atlantis "checklist items" that the area has in its favor that really don't exist in the Mediterranian or South America (ie, lots of elephants, dual rice harvests, etc...)
Anyway, now that it's posted... I'd be interesting in seeing some other Slashdotters' opinions about it.
=)
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Are we supposed to believe that the some great ancient civilization that possessed mythological technologies and a naval fleet some sort lived in a city with just 2 buildings? The map says there is a temple and a castle. That doesn't sound like a city let alone a civilization to me. Please, someone tell me what I'm missing.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
No it isn't. Many aspects of archaeology are non-repeatable. Excavation is the obvious example. If you cannot have a control and it is non-repeatable then I'd argue that it is not a science.
Secondly, although archaeology uses many scientific techniques, it is fundamentally subjective. Once you've excavated a site, got dates from objects and contexts one is still left with the subjective opinions of the primary excavator. What was Stonehenge for? Different archaeologists have different views, though they all may agree on the layout, size and age of the site. And don't even get started on Biblical archaeology!
Even before that though subjectivity comes into play - where do we dig? where are the bounds of the excavation? what methods of excavation are we going to use?
Check out some of the writings of Ian Hodder or Phil Barker to explore some of these ideas further.
BTW, IAAA.
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The more I think about it, the more I think Plato based his story of Atlantis on the destruction of Thera (neé Santorini).
Let's consider the following:
1. Thera in its heyday had a very advanced civilization by ancient standards with things like surprisingly modern plumbing systems!
2. The island of Crete--90 miles south of Thera--had more or less the same type of civilization on Thera.
3. When Thera's volcano did that catastrophic eruption, not only did most of the island sink into the sea from the eruption but it also created a massive tsunami wave that wiped out most of the smaller and larger human settlements on the north coast of Crete 90 miles south. That explains why there was considerable water and mud damage to Knossos.
4. If Solon had properly translated what he heard from the Egyptians in the 7th Century BC, he would have placed the destruction of Atlantis at 900 years, not 9,000 years before his time. 900 years would almost match perfectly the time Thera did its final eruption from Solon's contemporary perspective.
Atlantis is located on Antartica.
Atlantis is reputed (in ancient writings) to have a view of all three oceans and to be an island.
The Earth was not always at it's present axial tilt. Tilt the planet and Antartica will be located at the equator and have a view of all oceans. Look at a tilted globe sometime.
This has been the input of your local Free-Energy-Conspiracy nut.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Secondly, the ancient unit of measurement used by Plato - the stade - may have been 20% larger than traditionally assumed.
If the latter is true, one of the rectangular features on the "island" matches almost exactly the dimensions given by Plato for the temple of Poseidon.
I would love to know, if they have any particular reason for deciding that they need to redefine the size of a stade. Or if they just decided they needed to change the facts, to match the current situation.
Sure seems like one of those cases, where you could choose to make almost anything fit the description that Plato gave, with the proper adjustment to the measure of a stade.
Isn't Washington DC built in concentric circles too? Perhaps the Lincoln monument, or some such, can be said to match the temple, with teh proper adjustment to stade size, and we've actually recreated Atlantis w/o even trying.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
My $0.02 US is that the ancient city they just found is a colony of Atlantis. Atlantis was supposedly a powerhouse of a civilization. All great imperial powers set up colonies. The Greeks, the Romans, and the British. Just because this place has the rings and the temple does not mean its the *Real Slim Shady*. Think about how many places in the US are named after older cities and counties of Ireland and England (or for that matter, other cities in Europe). This could be a colony of Atlantis and the colonists chose to set up their colony just like from their homeland.
What I do find interesting that nobody has brought up here on Slashdot that's read the article is how this explains the Basques. The "homeland" of the Basques is in portions of Spain and France. Their language is not related to any other language in Europe. They claim they are the descendents of the Atlanteans. So finding this city, whether it be Atlantis or a colony thereof, easily now explains where the Basques came from.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
No it isn't. Many aspects of archaeology are non-repeatable. Excavation is the obvious example.
Excavation is not about digging dirt, the main part, and the one that matters is to not destroy anything that matters and rigorusly documenting every aspect of it.
That way you can "repeat the study" later by other archeologs, and based on new theories and/or information, possibly reach a totally different conclusion.
Secondly, although archaeology uses many scientific techniques, it is fundamentally subjective. Once you've excavated a site, got dates from objects and contexts one is still left with the subjective opinions of the primary excavator.
Exacty, and archeology is *exactly* like other sciences in that matter. Physics, for example is not *truth*, but merely a collection of our best efforts to describe the universe we live in.
A new *truth* can be found tomorrow and change the way we think about reality. Take the size and shape of the universe as an example, there are more than one theory about that one.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Your point about not destroying anything that matters is interesting. How do we know what matters to future generations of archaeologists? I'm sure those who 'excavated' the archaic/classical greek sites were doing their best, but they did destroy stuff that mattered to us now. It's naive to think that we're not doing the same today.
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From http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/Appendi xE/AppendixE.html the definition of the Scientific Method is:
Archaeology can do #1, and #2. Arguably it can do #3. However, #4 is right out as you don't have the ability to create alternate realities.
Part of the problem is that the BBC article seems to be missing some history behind the story that makes a non-island city a possibility. Plato pretty much lifted the Atlantis (city) story from the Egyptian tale of Keftiu (as well as embellished on it), a city that supposedly existed past the Pillars of Hercules (Straight of Gibraltar today, which separates Spain and Morocco). Keftiu is rooted in the Egyptian word for Pillar and was believed to be the end of the earth where the sky was held up. Atlantis means isle of Atlas - recognize the similarity? Atlas held up the world in Greek mythology. Keftiu also wasn't necessarily an island - it can either mean the Isle of Keft or the People of Keft. So, possibly due to a simple translation error, an island was born.
This could very easily be Atlantis. Minoan Crete never made sense (it never sunk) - Santorini island made more sense as most of it blew up (flooding Minoan Crete). It seems to me, though, that it was described as "west of Egypt" and that island's really NW.
Also the resevoir effect can throw dates off. Of course, many of the error situations are obvious, and thus won't throw you off. For example, you simply don't carbon date deep sea creatures (recycled carbon from oceanic conveyors), or plants that lived on the rim of an active volcano (carbon from deep in the earth), without expecting your results to be way off. There are lots of ways you can "catch" unexpected causes of carbon being off when they were expected to be correct, but in general, the results of carbon are dating quite accurate because the cases that can really throw carbon dating off are clearly exceptions, not the rule.
Calibration amounts are generally relatively small, so it's not a big deal. Creationists like to pretend that they're huge (they're not), or that all dating mechanisms are calibrated (most aren't; carbon dating is unusual). The most reliable dating methods, BTW, are methods like isochron and concordia/discordia methods, which have built-in error checking.
Probably the best indicator of the reliability of carbon dating in the general case is its correspondance to other dating methods, particularly (as was mentioned) dendrochronology. Different fossilized tree records, while showing somewhat varying levels of the different carbon isotopes in the atmosphere, show, to a good degree of accuracy, the *same* varying levels.
"Who the hell is Nietzche? It's a question stupid people are asking." -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"