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C-14 dating gave me a 400 year error on a burn layer, anyone else trust their lab too much?
I sent charcoal from a hearth in a dig near Santa Fe to a commercial lab and they came back with a date range I assumed was solid. Turned out the sample had root intrusion and old carbon mixed in, the real occupation layer was at least 400 years younger per the pottery typology. My first instinct was the pottery was wrong, not the radiocarbon, because I paid $650 for those dates. After re-running with a different pretreatment method, the lab admitted the original was contaminated. Has anyone else had a fancy lab result override your basic field reasoning, and how do you decide which evidence wins? I feel like we lean too hard on tech and not enough on context sometimes.
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elliotadams16d ago
That lab money makes you defend bad dates, a sunk cost thing.
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