Looking through one of the answers in another thread, I came across the following statement:

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The dates came back a couple of hundred years early because the wood used was from a mixture of live and dead trees. Radiocarbon dating can only tell you when the tree died, and not when the solution was made. Understanding the dates of radiocarbon in Giza required an understanding of how wood was collected in the old kingdom. At first they thought that they were using an old tree that had been lying around for centuries, this idea was overly simplistic. Then they realized that you cannot get the exact date from charcoal due to the factors involved. Parts of apparently healthy trees can be dead, branches can be dead, branches can be dead, bark can be dead. Therefore, when you try to date carbon from a solution, the readings will return as a combination of all the burnt wood in the sample.

Thus, if you use a tree that died in 2500 BC, and it was completely healthy, then the dates will return to 2500 BC. because dates are the range of all the dead parts that are also in the mortar. This is more complicated than that because parts of the tree may have died 100 years earlier, 200 years earlier, some trees thousands of years old. In particular, Palermo stone mentions trees from Lebanon, which, as you know, are only 2500 years old. Parts of these trees would die much earlier.

I would like to comment it here.

Indeed, when trying to date samples represented by residues of long-lived materials (wood; charcoal), the inbuilt age of the material influences the results of the study (the radiocarbon dating method allows one to evaluate when the life processes in the test sample have stopped, thus the long-dead parts present in the newly cut tree for its use in construction will affect the result of the study by increasing the age of the sample).
In order to get rid of the influence on the results of the inbuilt age of the samples, dating of samples consisting of short-lived materials such as seeds, grass, straw, etc. is carried out. The shorter-lived plant represents the sample, the less is the theoretical influence of the inbuilt age of the material on the result. For the abovementioned materials, the introduced error can be estimated by a value of not more than a few years, which is quite acceptable.

There is an interesting situation with studies of short-lived materials from the period of the Old Kingdom.
In 2010, Ramsey and the group of other researchers published the "Radiocarbon-Based Chronology for Dynastic Egypt", in which for the entire Old Kingdom they processed only 6 samples belonging presumably to the Djoser's reign. In my article, I show that the selection of samples for the Old Kingdom in this work is completely non-representative and therefore, based on the data obtained for this period, no acceptable model can be built for it.
Surprisingly, this work was approved by the scientific community and no further studies of samples of short-lived materials for Old Kingdom have been carried out to date. Since then, Egyptologists have widely used the "Radiocarbon-Based Chronology for Dynastic Egypt" as a confirmation of correctness of the current chronology, and the carbonists, although they understand the flawness of Ramsey's model for the Old Kingdom, are still silent, as Egyptologists have long rejected the radiocarbon dating method as unacceptable for Egypt (which does not give the necessary results) and only in 2009-2010 did these two areas come to a consensus.

Interestingly, the work of Bonani et al. (2001) also contains radiocarbon data of short-lived materials but these data were completely ignored by the Ramsey's group as inconvenient. The most useful data for us is data for the burial complex of Djedefre is that it allows us to evaluate both the average inbuilt radiocarbon age of the wood used in construction and more accurately estimate the age of buildings getting rid of the influence of the inbuilt age of materials.

Quote from my 2019 article:

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The most representative set consisting of only short-lived materials belongs to the pyramid temple of Djedefre (7 samples of straw). Djedefre pyramid is represented on the contrary only by long-lived materials (11 samples of charcoal). Since they were built at the same time and the average values of the radiocarbon age for these two sets are known (4229 ± 38 for the pyramid and 4169 ± 46 for the temple), the average inbuilt age of the wood can be roughly estimated as 60 ± 40 14C years.

Since the sample set for pyramid temple contains only short-lived samples and their average radiocarbon age is 4169 ± 46 BP (see Bonani (2001), Appendix 1, pp.1305-1306), the calibrated date range for the temple is 2889-2620 BC, with an average of about 2755 BC. The data obtained do not fit into the Ramsey's model and indicate a greater (for two centuries) age of the temple, which in this case can no longer be attributed to the "old tree" (or old bark; or old branches; or the usage by Egyptians exclusively stocks of bicentennial trees; or something other from the first quote).
A similar situation is observed for most buildings of the Old Kingdom, if we correctly evaluate the inbuilt age of the wood for other monuments, rather than assume the use in construction of antediluvian trees.

References:
1. Bonani G., Haas H., Hawass Z., Lehner M., Nakhla S., Nolan J., Wenke R., Wölfli W. (2001), Radiocarbon Dates of Old and Middle Kingdom Monuments in Egypt, Radiocarbon, Vol. 43 (3), pp.1297–1320.
2. Ramsey C., Dee M., Rowland J., Higham T., Harris S., Brock F., Quiles A., Wild E., Marcus E., Shortland A. (2010), Radiocarbon-Based Chronology for Dynastic Egypt, Science 328(5985), pp.1554-1557.
3. Ramsey C., Dee M., Rowland J., Higham T., Harris S., Brock F., Quiles A., Wild E., Marcus E., Shortland A. (2010), Supporting Online Material for Radiocarbon-Based Chronology for Dynastic Egypt, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2010/06/15/328.5985.1554.DC1



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 02/01/2020 02:14PM by keeperzz.