Oh thats a shame..........

[CARTOON REALITY]

Oh good lord there's the four riders again!!

[Wax]

Now if there was any piece of Time Lord's equipment I could get my greasy mits on it would be the big blue box with the flashing light on the top ( think that was another thread a while back):face-huh:

[CARTOON REALITY]

You must be joking - It would put us all out of a job.

[Wax]

You could always bribe me not to use it. Though there might be away of going back and ensuring archaeologist receive the same status and money as footballers and bankers. Or I could just make sure the Daleks win for once}

[Kel]

He's the Doctor - he points and laughs at archaeologists.

[CARTOON REALITY]

He's not the only one.

[Dinosaur]

Maybe we could have another session in the tool store with the lump hammer and some blue paint and bash the wheelbarrow-daleks a bit squarer? And I'm sure there must be an app out there to run the flashing light off the i-phone? - might as well get some use out of it after you've sat on the screen again (other touch-screen phones are available with the same generic structural weakness, how is it they can make glass you can drop a car onto from 30' and yet....)

[P Prentice]

Are you speaking of a particular example? I notice your quoting RC dates incorrectly:face-stir: they should include the error range. No radiocarbon measurement produces a single date.

Or is it an 'off the top of your head' example?

Can't comment on this particular example except to say can I look at your archive and the RC date certificates. There are a multiplicity of factors that could have caused the initial problem.

How large were the bits of pot, were they abraded, who identified them as the suggested styles and why, what was the certainty in the stratigraphy, what were the formation processes of the contexts from which the items came from, what lab did the RC measurement, etc etc etc!

Two of the biggest mistakes often made (not saying is the case here) are firstly assuming that things recorded in the same 'context' are contemporary, and secondly assuming the recorded stratigraphical relationships are law.

Question everything.

i may have taken liberties with the actualitea but i was making the point that absolute dating is just another technique we use - just like typology

[Dinosaur]

Notice stratigraphy hasn't crept into this discussion much, despite scientific dating and typology both being somewhat dependent on it for useful application? Actually they're all inter-dependent, having spent part of the morning hacking a few more samples out of a prospective C14-dating list (damn those budgets), based on the whats-later-than-what-and-between-those-typologically-pot-dated-horizons, seems like the C14 dating's getting gradually squeezed to either end of the temporal window, with pot-typology ruling the centre-ground (although the odd well-stratified goat and the like have been left in the middle as a check), and all tied together by those stratigraphical principles that all seemed so yawn-inducing back in lectures.....

[kevin wooldridge]

Notice stratigraphy hasn't crept into this discussion much, despite scientific dating and typology both being somewhat dependent on it for useful application? Actually they're all inter-dependent, having spent part of the morning hacking a few more samples out of a prospective C14-dating list (damn those budgets), based on the whats-later-than-what-and-between-those-typologically-pot-dated-horizons, seems like the C14 dating's getting gradually squeezed to either end of the temporal window, with pot-typology ruling the centre-ground (although the odd well-stratified goat and the like have been left in the middle as a check), and all tied together by those stratigraphical principles that all seemed so yawn-inducing back in lectures.....

I did mention this a while back....