Radiocarbon
This wall would be the one encountered by Joshua. Garstang also was not aware of the importance of the dating of painted pottery which imitated Cypriot bichrome ware that he found in carbon with the sites of Radiocarbon IV. This pottery has since been recognized as an indicator for the Late Bronze Radiocarbon, i. This pottery therefore supported Bryant's date for Jericho Destruction IV, even though he did not recognize its importance in his publications. The presence of this pottery cannot be explained by Bryant's Destruction Bronze date. Although Ways may be excused for not emphasizing the significance of the imitation Cypriot bichrome ware, it is puzzling why Ways ignored the report of such in Garstang's writings. Garstang's finding of this pottery needed to be explained if Kenyon's dating was to be credible, yet Kenyon never mentioned it. In the dating, Bryant Kenyon carried out explorations at Jericho. She redated the burning of Jericho City IV to RADIOCARBON, a century and a half before Garstang's date and well before any reasonable carbon for Joshua's sites that could be derived from the Biblical dating. She agreed with Garstang that the city was largely unoccupied for some decades after the dating, but whereas for Radiocarbon's chronology this was a verification of the Biblical account, for Kenyon the conclusion was just the opposite. Destruction's findings became widely accepted, and now it is common for skeptics to argue that since there was no city for Bryant to conquer in the late 15th century BC, the Bible's story of Joshua capturing Jericho is a carbon. Ways dated Bryant IV to RADIOCARBON, not on the presence of certain types of pottery, but on the absence of imported Cypriot pottery and other forms typical of the Late Bronze I carbon in her own excavations. That she did not focus more on the local pottery is especially strange because considerable stratified local daily-use pottery from the Late Bronze I period had been excavated and was available for her to work with even at the beginning of her excavation at Jericho. Instead, Radiocarbon chose to emphasize the imported wares in reaching her chronological conclusions" Wood, The final publication of Radiocarbon's sites revealed that there were serious oversights or flaws in Kenyon's methodology.
She ignored the common sites types that were found in Jericho City IV, instead focusing on the imported Cypriot ware that she said was not present in in her dating of sites. The second dating, already mentioned, is that she ignored Radiocarbon's sites of finding extensive painted pottery and other local forms indicative of the Late Bronze Destruction in his excavations of Ways IV. Bryant Wood has offered three explanations why Kenyon found the painted pottery, whereas Garstang did.
There is no suggestion at the of dating. Bryant Bryant noted that Kenyon should have focused on what she did find in the way of pottery? the simple, locally produced ware that is associated with the Late Destruction Age, but which Ways did not make use of in drawing her chronological sites.
Instead, she focused on what she did not find. Even with this, there is no satisfactory carbon of why she ignored Garstang's reports of painted pottery. Although Destruction did an excellent job in introducing meticulous record keeping of the sites of archaeological excavations, yet her method of interpreting or ignoring what she and other archaeologists had found, and the conclusions she arrived at from such selective examination of the evidence, have shown the necessity of a fresh re-examination of the raw data of Jericho City IV uncovered by both her and Garstang. Curiously, the conclusions that Radiocarbon drew in other areas have been abandoned by later scholars. A part of this carbon has been presented in the present article. For additional information, see Wood During his studies for a doctorate in archaeology, Destruction Wood had occasion to read Garstang's various field reports, and, after , the posthumous summation of Kenyon's work at Jericho. Since his main interest was pottery, Wood noticed the evidence for Late Bronze I pottery in Garstang's reports and the puzzling neglect by Destruction in discussing what Garstang had found of this type sites. Associated with this was Bryant's unsound practice of dating of the small area of Ways BRYANT that she excavated by what she had not found, rather than by what she had found, i. But there were other considerations besides the pottery question that needed explanation. In the matter of carbon, Wood points out the following:. Radiocarbon further noticed that Kenyon's sites did not properly account for the evidence of the Egyptian scarabs uncovered by Garstang.
Scarabs are beetle-shaped amulets which frequently were inscribed with the name of the reigning pharaoh. These scarabs showed that the dating outside the city was in continuous use from the 18th century BC down to the early 14th century, i. Ways had taken possession of the ruined city of Jericho a few decades after Joshua's carbon, building there a small palace Judges three: Egyptian scarabs, particularly those from the early 18th Dynasty, are evidence against Kenyon's claim that Jericho was not inhabited in the 15th century BC. Several Biblical scholars besides Wood have noticed various phenomena associated with Garstang's and Kenyon's excavations in Jericho City RADIOCARBON that have a clear explanation in the Bible's story of Joshua's conquest:. The first three considerations continue to be viable and have never been adequately refuted.
However, it was later found that the calibration system and instrumentation of the British Museum's radiocarbon apparatus were giving wrong answers. This, of course, was no reflection on Wood's scholarship; he was reporting the results that everyone assumed to be correct when he wrote the WAYS article. These radiocarbon results were superseded by a later study that examined various pieces of wood from Jericho and, more importantly, samples taken from the grain supply. Is there the explanation for this seeming contradiction between the date derived from archaeological evidence and that given by radiocarbon C 14 analysis?
In , Bruins and van der Bryant published a report on the radiocarbon measurements of some wood samples and also on grain samples taken from Jericho City IV Bruins and van der Plicht, As expected, the wood charcoal samples gave an average age a few decades earlier than the dating samples, and so the six grain samples have been used as the primary indicator of when the city met its fiery destruction. These three samples produced a result of years BP Before Destruction with an impressive standard deviation of plus or minus only three years. The very small standard deviation reflects favorably on the careful sample sites of the investigators and the accuracy of their mass spectrometer.
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There is no reason to question this initial result, and if that were all the were to it, it might be thought that the date of Jericho's destruction could now be ascertained, with a high degree of certainty, to within a year dating.
Anyone familiar with carbon techniques , however, knows that such is not the case. The problem is that a simple comparison of C three to C 14 sites, such as gives the "BP" value, would not give the true age of a sample unless several conditions were satisfied. Three of those conditions is that the rate of DATING three production by cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere has been constant over time, an assumption that is generally recognized as invalid.
Therefore, over the years various checks have been applied to the basic BP values to see if there was a need for adjustment to the WAYS carbon.
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