[HN Gopher] Archaeologists devise a better clock for Biblical times
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       Archaeologists devise a better clock for Biblical times
        
       Author : diodorus
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2022-12-26 23:56 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
        
       | sounds wrote:
       | https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209117119
        
       | not_knuth wrote:
       | https://archive.is/3Fma3
        
       | francisofascii wrote:
       | So this method of dating can determine when a piece of pottery
       | was " heated to sufficiently high temperatures"
       | 
       | So does that date the conquest (city burned) or when the pottery
       | was created (by high heat)? Could pottery be used over several
       | generations? I.e. Could broken pottery fragments have been
       | created 100 years before it was destroyed?
        
         | ars wrote:
         | In general most pottery didn't last that long, and was
         | essentially considered disposable. (With the exception of
         | extremely large, or ornate pieces.)
         | 
         | But pottery doesn't help with this because it records the
         | orientation of the magnetic field at that moment, and pottery
         | is movable.
        
         | Archelaos wrote:
         | The exact dates quoted in popular science articles are
         | typically not what you find in scientific papers. There you
         | have a lot of data points and discussions of confidence
         | intervals, etc. To address your pottery example: Indeed, if we
         | had dated only one shard, we could not conclude much from it.
         | If instead we had 10,000 shards over the whole area of a city
         | and find that they suddenly stop at a certain date, we can be
         | fairly sure that this date is very close to the destruction of
         | this city.
         | 
         | The general problem with biblical archaeology is that it is
         | particularly susceptible to dogmatically motivated biases.
         | During my studies in Heidelberg in the 1990s, I also took a few
         | courses in this field. I never met an archaeologist at the
         | entire university who even remotely believed in the existence
         | of king David, let alone Solomon, Saul or even Joshua or Moses.
         | However, when I visited Israel with a group of students, we
         | were proudly presented with artifacts from these "empires" in
         | some kibbutz museums. We or our professors did not directly
         | object, of course, but smiled politely, just like in the
         | churches where we were allowed to admire the miraculous icons.
        
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