One lecture at the museum made me rethink artifact dating methods

Last month I attended a talk at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science about radiocarbon dating. The speaker showed a 2,000 year old pottery shard that had been dated three different ways, and the results varied by 400 years. It hit me that we treat these numbers like facts, but they are really estimates with big margins. I started checking the footnotes on excavation reports I read online, and many skip the error ranges entirely. Has anyone else noticed how often published dates get quoted without their uncertainty included?

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the_wendy1mo ago

Skipped error ranges" is just cherry-picking.

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christopherw341mo ago

Well @the_wendy, people cherry-pick facts all the time, like when my neighbor only remembers the sunny days before moving here.

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