Had to pick between carbon dating and tree rings on a dig in Ohio

I went with tree rings for a wooden artifact we found near a creek, and the date was off by almost 200 years from what carbon said... Made me wonder if I should've trusted the lab results instead. Anyone else run into dating mismatches like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

logan52511d ago

Tree rings bit me hard too... I was so sure about a wooden bowl from a site in Indiana, but when I matched it to the local oak chronology, it landed smack in the middle of the 1700s when the carbon said early 1600s. Guess my dendro skills are more "de-nope" than dendrochronology... Lucky for me, nobody visits that exhibit anyway.

claire_davis3111d ago

And that's the thing with stuff like this, it's not just in archaeology or whatever, it's everywhere if you really look. I swear I see the same thing happen at the grocery store all the time where the expiration dates on milk or eggs don't line up with how they actually smell or taste, you know? Like my brain's trying to match up the printed date with what my nose is telling me and it's just this constant little battle. It reminds me of how my friend was trying to fix his old pickup truck, swore the noise was from the alternator because he looked up symptoms online, but turns out it was just a loose bolt on the exhaust manifold the whole time. We get so locked into one way of seeing things, like the tree rings or the shape of the spear point, that we forget the world doesn't always play by our little rules. That bowl must have been sitting in some weird pocket of soil or got moved around by animals or something, and that throws off everything we think we know.

pat78111d ago

Did you ever figure out what actually happened with the wood? I had a similar thing with a spear point from Ohio. Thought it was late woodland based on the shape and the way it was flaked but the soil layer it came from was all mixed up from an old root cellar or something. Ended up being early archaic by like 2000 years. Felt pretty dumb leaving it in the display case next to a bunch of woodland pots for three months before anyone noticed.