[HN Gopher] Archaeologists devise a better clock for Biblical times ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-12-27 23:00 UTC)