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Especially when the field is archaeology, which is a study and not a science. It has its rigor, but it is more of an interpretation of understanding rather than
by edmundsauto 4y ago
Especially when the field is archaeology, which is a study and not a science. It has its rigor, but it is more of an interpretation of understanding rather than experimentation.
Still valuable, still rigorous… but no ground truth is possible.
- tonyg 4y ago> no ground truth is possible. Oof. I have bad news for you about science in general.
- edmundsauto 4y agoEh, I'm not overly proscriptive that science answers all the questions, or that it has the precision people think that it does. OTOH, it has been important for civilizational science, so I'm pretty comfortable saying that it's a good option. More germane to the point, it's probably better to think about "ground truth" as "sufficiently reasonable approximation for the grain that I need to operate at".
- anthk 4y ago>but no ground truth is possible. Carbon 14.
- edmundsauto 4y agoThis is actually a really interesting situation. Carbon-14 resides only in organic matter, and so a lot of stone age artifacts found can only be dated based on what surrounds it. Humans have a tendency to dig down to bury organic matter, which makes it very difficult to understand if the C14 readings are associated with what artifacts. So while we can reasonably ascertain the age of (organic) artifacts, it does not answer the questions being asked.
- icare_1er 4y agoCarbon14 is hard-science. Archeology is not. It is mostly speculations, where you allow yourself to imagine a scenario that would explain what happened over 1 million years, on the basis of a bone that you found.