Rant: Carbon dating is great but not the final word on site age

Everyone treats a C14 result like gospel, but my dig in Ohio last spring had two samples from the same layer come back 400 years apart. We almost rewrote the whole settlement timeline before a local ceramic expert pointed out the charcoal could be old driftwood, not hearth debris. Has anyone else had a lab date mess with their stratigraphy this bad?

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paige_craig6d ago

Oh man, that driftwood thing is a classic. We had a similar headache on a site near the river, and the fix ended up being to only date short-lived stuff like seeds or twigs from the exact feature we were digging, not just whatever charcoal was lying around. Also, we started sending samples to two different labs for the same layer and comparing, which caught one bad batch of dates for us. It's a pain and costs more, but beats having to redo the whole sequence later.