Note: this topic is from February 3, 2006.
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Posted on 02/03/2006 8:59:13 AM PST by SunkenCiv
The Nefertiti scarab was worn as if from long use -- use for what? is what I'd like to know -- and due to the notoreity of her husband's regime,B 29 (When) Did it Happen? -- Further Resources -- DendrochronologyThis is another scientific dating method with the potential to provide absolute dates for the ancient Near East. It involves matching the annual rings in wood taken from excavations with a master tree-ring sequence. Work is in progress on a master sequence for Anatolia that currently spans over 1500 years. So far this has been joined only indirectly with more modern sequences of tree-rings that could provide a firm anchor for it, but many researchers are already treating it as a reliable yardstick.
by (I guess) John Bimson
Grove Books Online
As such it has been seized on as proof that a drastically shortened chronology cannot work. A Bronze Age shipwreck off Uluburun (Turkey) included among its cargo a scarab of Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten. A log also from the ship's cargo was dated to shortly before 1300 BC by matching its rings with the Anatolian master dendrochronology. This was hailed as confirmation that Akhenaten reigned in the 14th century BC [8]. However, in a little-publicised statement, the match between the log and the master sequence was subsequently admitted to be doubtful [9].
The task of matching finds to the master sequence is by no means straightforward, as the site of Tille Hoyuk (an outpost of the Hittite Empire) illustrates. Wood from a gateway was matched with the Anatolian master dendrochronology using two statistical criteria (called 'correlation' and 'trend') and dated to the 12th century BC. However, the Tille Hoyuk wood also matched another date very closely on both statistical tests, namely 981 BC: 'For 981 BC, the significance of the correlation was 99.99995% and of the trend, 99.5%. The investigators matched the wood to 1140 BC (correlation significance 99.9995%; trend significance 99.99999%).' [10] The later date for the gate's construction would clearly be incompatible with the conventional chronology, but would strongly support the CD revision. (Note that even the 1140 BC date involves extending Tille Hoyuk's existence several decades beyond the end of the Hittite Empire.)
More fundamentally, D. J. Keenan is suspicious of a methodology that can produce widely-separated dates with this high statistical confidence. He concludes: 'Anatolian dendrochronology should be regarded as suspect and in need of independent scrutiny.' [11]
I wrote a paper on dendrochronolgy back in 1975 for one of my archeology courses. Very interesting topic. I don't share Mr. Keenan's lack of confidence in D-scores, though. I think it can become a useful statistical tool in this field.If you had read the article, you would have known that D-scores were invented in the late 1980s (n.3). So you couldn't have known about, or even heard about, them in 1975. Also, contrary to your claim, the D-score does not exist in statistics. Keeenan (sect.2) states this explicitly. Even the researchers that Keenan is criticizing have acknowledged that (n.18).
If you are going to disagree with someone's argument, you ought to at least have looked at the reasons that they give for it. And you shouldn't pretend that you know what D-scores are.
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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Maybe he has a closet full of them from his days in school...
D-scores
The D-score combines the g-score and t-score, via the following formula.
gt − t/2
The problem here is that the above formula has no apparent meaning. Consider, for instance, the obvious formula for the area of a rectangle: base × height. This formula is not just arbitrarily chosen; rather, it can be derived and shown to have the meaning “area of rectangle”. Similarly, the formula for the area of a square whose sides have length l is l2, and again this formula is not arbitrary, but derived, and has meaning. The same is not true for D-scores. The choice of gt − t/2 is an arbitrary one among numerous formulae that could have been chosen to combine a t-score and g-score. For example, this formula might have been chosen instead.
gt2
There is no reason given for choosing one formula over the other. Furthermore, if the second formula had been chosen, then the wood from the gateway discussed in Section 4 would have been dated to 981 BC, rather than 1140 BC. This illustrates that the choice of the date for the wood (among dates with high g-scores and t-scores) is baseless—i.e. the date might almost just as well be chosen at random.
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