Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 22/09/2005 00:53, Bill Rea wrote:

> Peter wrote:-
>
>  
>
> > These Cornell people have published their interpretations
> > of the data they have discovered, but not the data itself. So their
> > results cannot be checked by their peers or anyone else. There is no way
> > to check whether their particular matches between different tree ring
> > sequences are the only possible ones, or just the possibility out of
> > several which fits best with their chronological presuppositions (see
> > the quotation below). This failure to publish one's data is bad science.
> > And yet everyone thinks they can depend on their results.
> >    
>
> Oh, come off it. This is a ***WEB*** site not an article in a peer
> reviewed journal.  This is classic anti-science talk, quick and dirty
> hand waving objections which require hours to rebut.  I'm out of this
> thread.
>  

I am not referring to the website, but to all of the publications by 
this team including those in peer reviewed journals, none of which 
include raw data, only the team's own interpretations of the data. 
Believe me, I have looked at this in some detail in the last few months.

Or if you don't believe me, look at all of the articles in peer reviewed 
journals listed in their bibliography linked to at this site, and in the 
bibliographies in those articles, and tell me in which you find data to 
support their particular match between their Gordion and Porsuk data 
sets. They don't even give the t-value indicating the quality of their 
match, i.e. they don't provide the kind of useful data for this match 
which they provide for other, much older matches on the last page of 
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/TUBA-ARCaptured.pdf.

They come closest to giving the data in 
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/Bochum%202005.pdf, but they give (as 
Table 1) a combined table of raw data for all of their sites put 
together, based on their presumed match. If they had published the same 
data separately for each site, it would have been possible to check for 
alternative matches, but with the combined data it is not. But this data 
does show that the total number of logs supporting their match between 
Gordion and Porsuk is no more than four, a dangerously low number for 
matching between two geographically remote sites and I think different 
species. There is no radiocarbon support for their match, because there 
are no published radiocarbon dates for Porsuk wood, only for Gordion.

Yet the match between Gordion and Porsuk is key to all of this team's 
dating of the Bronze Age and earlier. A match with a chronology several 
centuries shorter would fit better with some chronological theories, but 
might not have even been considered by this Cornell team. A longer 
chronology would be very hard to prove or to disprove because there 
would be even fewer, perhaps even zero, overlaps between the Gordion and 
Porsuk data. The chosen match is also suspiciously inconsistent with the 
ice core data on the issue of the dating of the Thera eruption. But 
that's another matter which I won't go into here.

Sorry to go so far off topic, but I do need to prove that there is 
substance behind my previous posting, not just "quick and dirty hand 
waving objections".


--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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