Toto

Where the previous dates for copper mining in Europe fixed on something other than C14 dates? (I don't know, but I would assume that they were all based on some C14 dating.) So discovery of an earlier copper object just redefines the "copper age." It doesn't conflict with dating from some other source.

David Rohl

JW:
Chink. This reminds me of the carbon dating of The Shroud. The Shroud was already determined to be 14th century based on the available evidence and carbon dating confirmed this date. The standard control before the three independent and prestigious laboratories dated The Shroud was for them to date the same 3 relics, one of which was ancient Egyptian, all with well known dates. All labs dated the relics within the normal acceptable ranges.

DR: It has now been shown that the samples of linen taken from the shroud for C14 testing came from a repaired area and that the sample threads were interwoven with cotton from the Late Medieval period. The samples were therefore contaminated with later material and therefore the C14 date is worthless. That's science for you!

David Rohl

"The C14 dating method does not use dendrochronology. Dendrochronology uses C14."

DR: First sentence wrong; second sentence precisely right! So the calibration tool used to establish the correct C14 date is itself determined by C14 testing. Now that is a circular methodology.

Of course, calibrated C14 dates use dendrochronology for their calibration.

matthijs

As Joe Wallack noted, preference is to be paid to objective evidence over the subjective analysis of a historian. C14 is a matter of scientific interpretation. You can attempt to impugn it on scientific grounds, but your appeal to non-scientific data makes no sense. Science trumps historical dating whenever the two are in disagreement.

Neither is your own dating method. And the failings of this anti-C14 dogma at the scientific level have been adequately shown in this thread, and inadequately responded to. Your approach so far has been to throw doubt on anything that doesn't sit cozy within your framework. But throwing doubt is not sufficient when the doubt has been returned in kind. You need to provide something more conclusive.

(And for those of us with bad eyesight, we'd appreciate it if you could write quotes in between a [QUOTE] tag and a [/QUOTE] tag. I enjoy reading your responses, but they're making me squint )

Elske.

JoeWallack

JW:
Well you know what they say, a picture of a Shroud is worth a thousand words. What is it about you Spaniards who claim to be agnostic on your profiles here. As far as I know you are the only non-believer in the history of the world to believe what you wrote above.

In fact a textile expert was present when the sample was taken and representatives of the Church and supporters of authenticity were present to supervise the circumcision. After the carbon dating the Church confessed that The Shroud probably was 14th century. It wasn't until there was a new Pope Shershenk in town that the Church changed its tune and these claims of contamination are a relatively recent phenomena. Amazing that with this supposed contamination all three independent labs give consistent results. The only scientist even qualified to date the Shroud by other means, Walter McCrone, said that the rumor was that The Italian Commission had already unofficially carbon dated The Shroud to 14th century before McCrone started working on it. Do you think The Shroud is authentic?

I just have to ask if Jackson is a supporter of your New Chronology. ahta mehdaber evereet?



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

spin

I should add by way of another nail in the coffin of the Ramses II/Shishak theory that the place name Raamses (Ex 1:11, etc.), r(mss, ostensibly from the same period as the name Ramses (given that it is supposed to be named after the pharaoh) is written with two sameks. This is a very inconvenient truth for Mr Rohl, whose lack of sins is no blessing.


spin

David Rohl

DR: It would be rather stupid of me to take on science with scientific argument when I am not a trained scientist, wouldn't it? I can only use the tools of my discipline.

DR: You're absolutely right, my own dating method is not proven. Never said it was. But neither is the Orthodox Chronology. Nor is any historical interpretation. Nor will they ever be. But all (including my own) use the tools of historical method and that is all that historians can expect of their colleagues. I would have thought that science is also subjective and open to human error (e.g. the sampling method on the Turin Shroud). Please demonstrate to me that C14 is a proven methodology for the BC era. If you can't, then science does not trump historical method in this instance.

Have no idea how to do that. I am trying to insert answers here but have no idea if it is going to work.

David Rohl

DR: Wow, you really are out of touch!! And no I do not claim the cloth is genuine - just that the science was flawed.

PRESS RELEASE: Los Alamos National Laboratory team of scientists prove carbon 14 dating of the Shroud of Turin wrong

COLUMBUS, Ohio, August 15 — In his presentation today at The Ohio State University’s Blackwell Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) chemist, Robert Villarreal, disclosed startling new findings proving that the sample of material used in 1988 to Carbon-14 (C-14) date the Shroud of Turin, which categorized the cloth as a medieval fake, could not have been from the original linen cloth because it was cotton. According to Villarreal, who lead the LANL team working on the project, thread samples they examined from directly adjacent to the C-14 sampling area were “definitely not linen” and, instead, matched cotton. Villarreal pointed out that “the [1988] age-dating process failed to recognize one of the first rules of analytical chemistry that any sample taken for characterization of an area or population must necessarily be representative of the whole. The part must be representative of the whole. Our analyses of the three thread samples taken from the Raes and C-14 sampling corner showed that this was not the case.” Villarreal also revealed that, during testing, one of the threads came apart in the middle forming two separate pieces. A surface resin, that may have been holding the two pieces together, fell off and was analyzed. Surprisingly, the two ends of the thread had different chemical compositions, lending credence to the theory that the threads were spliced together during a repair.
LANL’s work confirms the research published in Thermochimica Acta (Jan. 2005) by the late Raymond Rogers, a chemist who had studied actual C-14 samples and concluded the sample was not part of the original cloth possibly due to the area having been repaired. This hypothesis was presented by M. Sue Benford and Joseph G. Marino in Orvieto, Italy in 2000. Benford and Marino proposed that a 16th Century patch of cotton/linen material was skillfully spliced into the 1st Century original Shroud cloth in the region ultimately used for dating. The intermixed threads combined to give the dates found by the labs ranging between 1260 and 1390 AD. Benford and Marino contend that this expert repair was necessary to disguise an unauthorized relic taken from the corner of the cloth. A paper presented today at the conference by Benford and Marino, and to be published in the July/August issue of the international journal Chemistry Today, provided additional corroborating evidence for the repair theory.

Duke Leto

You've got it. If you want to attribute the quotes to some poster or another, you can alter the first quote tag to [quote=poster].

I'm not sure that the shroud is really germane to our discussion since the position David and I are advocating is that the calibration curves don't get badly out of whack until about 500 BCE, well within either date of creation for the shroud. David's contention is not just that the Iceman is out of place according to conventional carbon dating but that the pharaohs of the old kingdom have carbon dates that are noticibly too high for the current historical placements. I remember reading in Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" that North American field archaeologists are still in a certain degree of dispute about radiocarbon calibration for very old american sites. Diamond's thoughts seemed to be that you could not put too much faith in pre-clovis radiocarbon dates when the overwhelming evidence suggests that the Holocene extinction wave hit the Americas at precisely the time the clovis hunters crossed from Beringia. (I lent my copies of Diamond to my brother last year, so I can't check.)

(FWIW, I don't think that the shroud sample actually came from a patched area, David, you're misinformed on that point.)

Below I'm posting a couple of links on the comparative inaccuracy of radiocarbon in dating the Egyptian Old Kingdom:

http://www.aeraweb.org/how_old.asp

This paper actually suggests a mechanism for the inaccuracy, the Mediterranean itself is here supposed to have been exuding carbon as a long term result of the opening of the Bosporus:

http://www.informath.org/pubs/14C02a.pdf

Huon

The archives of the french département (district) Aube, in the town Troyes, (series 9 G) preserve the first written traces mentioning the existence of the shroud of the collegiate church of Lirey. For the erection of collegiate institutions, the authority of the Holy See is necessary. A collegiate church usually does not depend of the local bishop. So, the collegiate church of Lirey was not dependent of the bishop of Troyes.

Around 1350, the shroud appeared in Lirey and was shown for the first time in 1357. The chevalier (knight) Geoffroy de Charny who was the lord of the village, obtained in 1353 a pension from the king of France John II the Good to build the collegiate church of Lirey. The church was built and the shroud preserved inside it. To help pigrimages, Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254) granted indulgences to the pilgrims. In 1356 Geoffroy de Charny was killed at the battle of Poitiers. His son Geoffroy II de Charny succeeded him and died in 1398.

In the archives, one can find a papal bull edicted by Pope of Avignon Clement VII (1378-1394). This bull tries to put an end to a conflict between Geoffroy II (plus the collegial church canons) and the bishop of Troyes, Pierre d’Arcis.

Many times had Pierre d’Arcis forbidden the exposition of the shroud, which he considered to be a recent forgery. In 1389, the Pope had authorized the exposition. Then Pierre d’Arcis wrote a report to the Pope to prove that the shroud is the work of a forger. In january 1390, Clement VII published an arbitration, promulgating four similar acts, one for the bishop of Troyes, one for Geoffroy II de Charny, and the other two for two neighbouring bishops. Two of these documents are preserved in the archives of Aube.


After having reminded that the exposition of the shroud is legitimate, and reminded the stages of the conflict, the Pope compels the person responsible for the exposition to say clearly and intelligibly in loud voice "this figure or representation is not the true shroud of Our Lord Jesus Christ, but only a painting or a picture which represents him". The pope’s decision forbids also that the ceremonies be too sumptuous, as this could incite the fidels to believe in the authenticity of the relic.

But, let us go back to egyptology.