Just realized the "out of place artifact" crowd might have a point after all

I was dead set against the idea of anomalous artifacts until I handled a bronze buckle from a dig in Minnesota that radiocarbon dated to 800 AD, clear outside the accepted timeline. The lab tech double checked the sample and got the same result, so how do you explain something like that without rethinking your assumptions? Has anyone else run into data that just doesn't fit the textbook?

2 comments

2 Comments

stellaa6915d ago

Taking a buckle out of context feels like cheating, but sometimes the dirt knows better than the textbooks.

johnson.faith14d ago

@stellaa69 has a good point about context, but the context is what's weird. The buckle came from a sealed layer under a known Viking site in Minnesota. No plow disturbance, no rodent holes, no mixing. The dirt was undisturbed. If radiocarbon is right, and I trust the lab, then the textbooks are just wrong on when people got to the Midwest. I've got two other pieces from that site that don't match standard timelines either.