On Thu, 22 Sep 2005, Peter Kirk wrote:
There are also a number of very serious technical difficulties with
dendrochronological dating, especially of anything related to the Middle
East - which is based on unpublished data. While I certainly don't
reject such methods out of hand like Karl and James, neither do I accept
that all questions have been solved by some marvellous scientific wizardry.
If you're concerned about the Middle East dendrochronological dating
a good web site is:-
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/
This covers the Aegean and Near East. As for unpublished data, I
offer no comment.
Harold Holmyard recommended the following site:-
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/docs/tree_ring.asp
It says early on:-
However, when the interpretation of scientific data contradicts the true
history of the world as revealed in the Bible, then it's the
interpretation of the data that is at fault.
This is faith, not science. I offer no further comment.
The biggest problem with the process is that ring patterns are not unique. There are many points in a given sequence where a sequence from a new piece of wood match well (note that even two trees growing next to each other will not have /identical/ growth ring patterns). Yamaguchi recognized that ring pattern matches are not unique. The best match (using statistical tests) is often rejected in favour of a less exact match because the best match is deemed to be ‘incorrect’ (particularly if it is too far away from the carbon-14 ‘age’). So the carbon ‘date’ is used to constrain just which match is acceptable. Consequently, the calibration is a circular process and the tree ring chronology extension is also a circular process that is dependent on assumptions about the carbon dating system.
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