Overheard a geology grad student say something about 'dating accuracy' that made me question a dig report

Was grabbing coffee near the university last week and caught two grad students arguing near the display case. One of them said 'the lab dated that bone to 12,000 BP but the context layer had a modern shoe print.' Nobody double checks these things before publishing. Has anyone else run into excavation reports where the dates don't match the stratigraphy?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_charles3d ago

I had a similar thing a few years back with a report from a site in New Mexico. The radiocarbon dates on some charcoal were coming back at 8,500 BP, but the ceramic sherds in the same layer were clearly from a much later Pueblo period. I went back to the original field notes and found out the lab sample was taken right next to a rodent burrow that nobody marked on the map. That kind of sloppy context control makes the whole report useless unless you dig into the raw data yourself. It's like people just trust the number and move on without thinking about how it got there. I'm with you, it's maddening when the story the dates tell doesn't match the dirt.

the_henry3d ago

Get where you're coming from completely. I've seen radiocarbon dates that looked way off compared to the soil layers they were pulled from, and it's frustrating when nobody bothers to explain the gap. That kind of mismatch makes the whole report feel shaky even if the rest of the data is solid.

william_jackson653d ago

@the_henry nailed it, I just cross-checked with nearby site reports and it saved me from publishing junk.