Radiocarbon dating

Oh, hi, Monsignor.

How are you? How are things in Turin? Yeah, we'd like to come over next weekend and take some samples for C-14 dating on the Shroud.

Okay, we'll be right over.

It doesn't work like that.

So they do.

They take the sample from the corner.

They do the C-14 dating.

It comes up medieval.

They build chronologies layer by layer, clue by clue.

Radiocarbon dating is the workhorse.

Organic materials, charcoal from hearths, bone collagen, bits of wood, contain carbon isotopes that decay at a predictable rate.

Measure what's left, calibrate it against known fluctuations in atmospheric carbon, and you get a date range.

They mean a very specific culture we can actually see in the ground.

On Malta, that culture gets a slightly dry label, the Temple Period, roughly between 4000 and 2500 BCE.

the people themselves didn't call it that they didn't think of themselves as temple builders any more than medieval peasants thought of themselves as gothic cathedral people they were just people farming fishing making pottery raising children and occasionally carving astonishing things out of stone the hypogeum fits into that world Radiocarbon dates and pottery styles line it up with the same Neolithic communities that built the great above-ground megalithic temples at Gantija, Egar Kim, Manajdra and others.

Same types of ceramics, same tool traditions, same decorative motifs.

And we think it's due to the effects of Noah's flood affecting the carbon balance in the atmosphere.

So we're talking about radiocarbon dating or radioactive dating.

That's the issue with carbon-14.

Actually, carbon-14 is used to show that millions of years' dates really can't be true.

Again, the method has boundaries.

Radiocarbon becomes less precise as you go further back.

Beyond about 50,000 years, there is so little carbon-14 left that the signal fades into noise.

Charcoal can also be reused.

The painting is older than the first growth of the stone that seals it.

Each of these clues comes with its own error bars.

Radiocarbon might give you a span of several hundred years.

Uranium series might carry uncertainties of a few percent of the age.