The Hallstatt Plateau

Current topics

The Hallstatt Plateau

Postby Boreades » 6:25 pm

Something just stumbled on. The Hallstatt Plateau. At first glance, you might think (like I did) "what's that, something to do with Hallstatt in Austria?" - but you'd be wrong. It's a chuffing great big, euphemistically named, problem in Radiocarbon Dating.

The Hallstatt plateau is a term used in archaeology that refers to a consistently flat area on graphs that plot radiocarbon dating against calendar dates. Radiocarbon dates of around 2450 BP (Before Present) always calibrate to ca. 800-400 BC, no matter the measurement precision

Eh? Run that by me again?

It is impossible to sensibly resolve the radiocarbon dates of any samples whose true ages lie between 400 and 800 BC.

e.g.
http://www.academia.edu/1683496/The_lat ... strategies

But why? It seems like something went BANG c. 800BC and chucked loads of Carbon 14 into the atmosphere, thereby screwing the whole methodology of carbon dating. It seems to coincide with the start of what "they" call the Bronze Dark Collapse, and megalithic culture and trade started working part-time for c.400 years.

I wouldn't mind so much except I'd always thought Radiocarbon Dating was somehow more reliable than the opinion of Orthodox Archeologists.
Boreades
 
Posts: 2081
Joined: 2:35 pm

Re: The Hallstatt Plateau

Postby Donna » 7:18 pm

Boreades wrote:It is impossible to sensibly resolve the radiocarbon dates of any samples whose true ages lie between 400 and 800 BC.

Sounds like radiocarbon daters have run up against the 'missing 500 years' that since the nineteenth century have bedevilled historians. Could be this gap is the proper explanation for the term Dark Ages!
Donna
 
Posts: 29
Joined: 9:30 pm

Re: The Hallstatt Plateau

Postby Boreades » 10:43 pm

Donna wrote:Sounds like radiocarbon daters have run up against the 'missing 500 years' that since the nineteenth century have bedevilled historians. Could be this gap is the proper explanation for the term Dark Ages!


Yes, it does seems like that, but I wonder who's saying there must be any years missing? After mulling it over for a few hours I recall that what we are taught as "continuous history" is in fact a patchwork quilts of bits and pieces of fragmented historical records from all over. Sometimes the pieces join together nicely, sometimes there are ragged edges that are tucked under each other in the hope that nobody notices the join.

It could be the archaeos are busy with finger pointing to divert attention from inadequacies in their own interpretations. Maybe we need to look for people who say the patchwork quilt needs rearranging?
Boreades
 
Posts: 2081
Joined: 2:35 pm

Re: The Hallstatt Plateau

Postby Mick Harper » 11:27 pm

It's all in Velikovsky. Basically five hundred spurious years got inserted because of a misreading of Manetho's king-lists of the Egyptian pharoahs in the late nineteenth century which, since everybody else uses Egyptian chronology, means everybody else is out and has to insert five hundred years somewhere to catch up.

The Greek Dark Ages -- roughly between the Trojan Wars (officially 1200 BC but actually 700 BC) and Solon's Athens -- is a case in point. Instead of everyone trudging off to the Trojan Wars, disappearing for five hundred years, and then all the same cast of characters re-appearing to start setting up Classical Greece, the whole thing can be just seen as the normal progression.
Mick Harper
 
Posts: 910
Joined: 10:28 am

Re: The Hallstatt Plateau

Postby Boreades » 12:23 pm

We might have mentioned this elsewhere, but just in case ... the "gaps in time" issue is well covered by the Q-mag people, in their own way, although they seem to favour 700 years as the size of the gap.

http://www.q-mag.org/topics.html#RtCPPF1T

But "gap" isn't the correct word is it?
Boreades
 
Posts: 2081
Joined: 2:35 pm


Return to Index

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 115 guests