Just started "The Bible Unearthed"

[Won2blv]

I just started this book. I know that I am going to have a lot of questions. Anyone here pretty well educated on this topic and willing to field some questions as they come up? One general question, how are archeologists able to make sure (or close to) conclusions based off of centuries old cities? Like these cities that are 2500-3000 years old, sometimes I read about new discoveries based off of a pottery shard or something like that. I saw Pompeii recently and was amazed by its preservation, but this is a major anomaly right? Most cities aren't preserved by layers of volcanic ash. Anyway, thanks for the help

[Minimalist]

Pottery.

Since the late 19th century scholars have been cataloging pottery styles and decorative motifs.  It is now quite a database of accumulated shards.

http://apd.farli.org/home/introduction

The father of modern archaeology and the Seriation and Typology of artifacts is Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942). While excavating in Egypt, Petrie noticed the nuances in pottery from site to site. He than realized one could notice the development and change of artifacts from various sites and thus place them in chronological order, giving a relative chronology to the site in which they were found. 



Since then and as Ancient Near Eastern archaeology developed, more and more pottery assemblages and variants were found and added to our knowledge. As technology progresses, more and more tools are added to the archaeologist's arsenal of dating archaeological strata and artifacts, such as C14, dendrochronology, and thermoluminescence. However pottery typology remains as important now as it was in the beginning of the 20th century.

Feel free to ask your questions.

[robvalue]

Min is the man for the job!

"Old broken stuff" probably isn't a very useful comment so I'll leave it to him

[Minimalist]

"Old broken stuff"

Don't talk about my knees like that!

[Minimalist]

More on dating.  Sometimes they get lucky and find organic material for c14 testing.  Improvements in the process now have them able to obtain dates for such short-lived items as cereal grains or pollen.

Here is a report on the c14 dating done at Tell-es-Sultan ( Jericho ).  It's a bit technical but then science usually is.

http://www.rug.nl/research/portal/files/...Bruins.pdf

[Won2blv]

More on dating.  Sometimes they get lucky and find organic material for c14 testing.  Improvements in the process now have them able to obtain dates for such short-lived items as cereal grains or pollen.

Here is a report on the c14 dating done at Tell-es-Sultan ( Jericho ).  It's a bit technical but then science usually is.

http://www.rug.nl/research/portal/files/...Bruins.pdf

Thanks again, I'm not the best reader so it takes me a while to digest everything. But i'll keep the questions coming

[Won2blv]

[/quote]Feel free to ask your questions.[/quote]


How are archeologist able to split up the advancements in pottery technology? This makes sense to me how they use the pottery to date the dig site. But how are they certain that a certain advancement came about when it did? How would they be able to discern that a city wasn't using older methods due to lack of specific tools or a longstanding heritage?

[Won2blv]

More on dating.  Sometimes they get lucky and find organic material for c14 testing.  Improvements in the process now have them able to obtain dates for such short-lived items as cereal grains or pollen.

Here is a report on the c14 dating done at Tell-es-Sultan ( Jericho ).  It's a bit technical but then science usually is.

http://www.rug.nl/research/portal/files/...Bruins.pdf

Sorry, I guess this post kind of helps me out with some of those questions. I'll try to read it one sentence at a time and hopefully I'll get it

[Minimalist]

Feel free to ask your questions.

How are archeologist able to split up the advancements in pottery technology? This makes sense to me how they use the pottery to date the dig site. But how are they certain that a certain advancement came about when it did? How would they be able to discern that a city wasn't using older methods due to lack of specific tools or a longstanding heritage?

You haven't asked a silly question yet.  This one is practically a degree field within archaeology however!  Books have been written on the subject. And, in fact, this one gives a fairly simple explanation of how it is done.  https://books.google.com/books?id=lefOg3...gy&f=false

In essence, they have been categorizing pottery for a century and a half as fashions and decorative motifs went in and out of style.  Thus, for example, if we find a Minoan pottery item in Luxor it is indicative of trade between Crete and Egypt, not that Egyptians suddenly started making Cretan pottery.

Below is a chart done by Israeli Archaeologist, Amihai Mazar, showing the similarities for decorative motifs between Mycenean and Philistine pottery.  This demonstrates that the Phiistines ( or Peleset, as they Egyptians called them) were ethnically Greek.  When an archaeologist excavating at Ashdod or Ekron finds a strata containing typically Canaanite pottery and right on top of that is a destruction layer and the layer above that contains pottery of a Philistine type it is pretty easy to see what happened.  The Philistines landed, overran the existing settlement and built their own on top of it.  The destruction layer will usually have enough organic material for c14 dating.  It is a puzzle and every site is unique with its own story to tell.

[Won2blv]

Feel free to ask your questions.

How are archeologist able to split up the advancements in pottery technology? This makes sense to me how they use the pottery to date the dig site. But how are they certain that a certain advancement came about when it did? How would they be able to discern that a city wasn't using older methods due to lack of specific tools or a longstanding heritage?

You haven't asked a silly question yet.  This one is practically a degree field within archaeology however!  Books have been written on the subject. And, in fact, this one gives a fairly simple explanation of how it is done.  https://books.google.com/books?id=lefOg3...gy&f=false

In essence, they have been categorizing pottery for a century and a half as fashions and decorative motifs went in and out of style.  Thus, for example, if we find a Minoan pottery item in Luxor it is indicative of trade between Crete and Egypt, not that Egyptians suddenly started making Cretan pottery.

Below is a chart done by Israeli Archaeologist, Amihai Mazar, showing the similarities for decorative motifs between Mycenean and Philistine pottery.  This demonstrates that the Phiistines ( or Peleset, as they Egyptians called them) were ethnically Greek.  When an archaeologist excavating at Ashdod or Ekron finds a strata containing typically Canaanite pottery and right on top of that is a destruction layer and the layer above that contains pottery of a Philistine type it is pretty easy to see what happened.  The Philistines landed, overran the existing settlement and built their own on top of it.  The destruction layer will usually have enough organic material for c14 dating.  It is a puzzle and every site is unique with its own story to tell.

So the c14 testing is done on the layers of organic material around the pottery and not the pottery itself? What is the control that allows archeologists to make confident assumptions that the sites haven't been corrupted from hundreds and thousands of years of possible outside influence?