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Decided between carbon dating and dendrochronology on a site in Cornwall

I had to pick between spending my limited budget on carbon dating a set of bones or tree ring analysis on some timbers we pulled from a bog. Went with the dendro since it could give me year-by-year accuracy, but now I'm stuck with a date range that's 200 years wide on the human remains. Anybody else face this kind of funding call and regret it?

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the_barbara5mo ago

Actually, dendrochronology can be way tighter than a 200 year range if you have enough rings to work with. The problem is usually that the timbers might not have bark edge or enough sapwood to pin down the exact felling year, so you end up with a floating chronology that only gives a terminus post quem. That plus any possible reuse of the timber (like in a well or building) can blow that range way out. If you've got the original ring sequence still available, you might be able to cross-match it to a regional master chronology and narrow it down a lot, but yeah, sometimes the bog water just eats away at the outer rings.

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abbyl495mo ago

OH MY GOD wait, I actually just got CHILLS reading that part about bog water eating away the outer rings! That is SO wild to me, like imagine all that careful work and then the one thing you NEED to pin it down is just... gone, dissolved in swamp juice. I never really thought about how the environment can literally destroy the evidence you're looking for, even when the wood itself survives. It kinda makes you wonder how many perfectly good samples have been ruined by just being in the wrong wet spot.

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