Posted on 05/21/2003 4:39:06 PM PDT by blam
It reminds me of when I used to live in Virginia. It seemed like every week some hunter or hiker would discover a body and thought it to be a modern-day murder victim. Wrong, it was a body from the Civil War. Happened all the time.
Any Idea why?
Uther spent his youth in exile in Breton with his elder brother Aurelius Ambrosius. They return to Britain to dethrone Vortigern, and Aurelius is made king. He sends his brother and Merlin to Ireland in order to fetch the Giants' Ring. When Aurelius is poisoned, a celestial portent appears and Merlin interprets this as forecasting the glories of Uther and his unborn offspring. The main feature of this portent is a luminous dragon, whence Uther's sobriquet "Pendragon". Geoffrey explains it as meaning "a dragon's head", but more probably it means "head dragon", which may be interpreted as "foremost leader" or "chief of warriors".
And he is still stuck with gold running in the mid 300 dollar range. He should have bought Microsoft.
" a celestial portent appears
King Arthur is believed to have died in 540AD+-2, the Dark Ages began in 540AD+-2, tree ring records show a worldwide catastrophe at 540AD+-2, it is well known that comets and meteorites were called dragons in those times.
Some anthropologists and others think the tales of King Arthur are a description of a comet swarm impacting in 540AD that put the whole world into a dark age.
If unambiguous samples are found and properly handled, it can be.
Here is what often goes wrong:
1) A person is buried 900 years ago. 400 years later, little is left of the remains. A tree root invades the burial site, and in time, the tree dies, and the root decays. A sample of material surrounding the bones is counted.
What is the indicated age? Some average of the two.
2) An unfired clay figurine had been reinforced with sticks during its making. So it is safe to assume that the sticks date from around the time the clay was formed. However, the clay was taken from a riverbed, where, a thousand years before, plant matter was entrapped in the clay, laid down in a flood season. The result is artifically older. C14 has a half life of 5730 years +/- 40 years and this rate is absolute and definite, but sample mixing can interfere badly.
In Egyptian tomb cases, where food offerings have been buried in pottery jars, it is less likely that thousand-year old grain was buried with the dead, so these dates are confident. But suppose something belonging to an ancient ancestor were buried and measured!
In my part of the country, remains do not last long in Northern Woodlands soil, so the potential for error is high.
They can be a blessing. A trench was being dug, and fragments of small stone and ceramic tiles were found. Work came screeching to a halt.
The beautiful Roman villa at Fishbourne was found this way. A "Boy on a Dolphin" mosaic floor is in quite good condition, and the hypocaust heating system is in good shape, considering the Romans went home in the 400's.
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