Ceramic Dinosaurs Discovered in Acambaro: What Do You Think?

[force majeure]

What do you guys think of this?


http://www.omniology.com/3-Ceramic-Dinos.html

 

[SGT]

It seems another creationists scam to prove that dinosaurs were alive 4000 years ago.
How can anybody obtain radiocarbon dates in ceramics?

 

[force majeure]

well, some of the 33,500 found were made of stone:

There were not only ceramic pieces but also stone pieces.

also check this out:

In the 1940s and 1950s the Iguanodon was completely unknown. No hoaxer could have known of the Iguanodon existence much less made a model, for it wasn't until 1978 of 1979 that skeletons of adult Iguanodons were found with nests and babies.

 

[Chronos]

I once saw an amoeba in a cloud formation before I even knew there was such a critter. How ancient are those? I wonder, was the pottery iguanodon so exquisitely detailed, it unmistakably represented the real thing? Judging by pictures of the crafted Acambaro dinosaurs, any resemblance between an actual creature, past or present requires, shall we say, a great deal of imagination? And let's not forget the stone pieces. Unlike ceramics, stones are easy to carbon date... Hmm, last time I checked only organic matter can be carbon dated. This story has more bull than a rodeo.

 

[force majeure]

i guess you'd better check again:

http://www.c14dating.com/int.html

It follows from this that any material which is composed of carbon may be dated.Herein lies the true advantage of the radiocarbon method, it is able to be uniformly applied throughout the world. Included below is an impressive list of some of the types of carbonaceous samples that have been commonly radiocarbon dated in the years since the inception of the method:

Charcoal, wood, twigs and seeds.
Bone.
Marine, estuarine and riverine shell.
Leather.
Peat
Coprolites.
Lake muds (gyttja) and sediments.
Soil.
Ice cores.
Pollen.
Hair.
Pottery.
Metal casting ores.
Wall paintings and rock art works.
Iron and meteorites.
Avian eggshell.
Corals and foraminifera.
Speleothems.
Tufa.
Blood residues.
Textiles and fabrics.
Paper and parchment.
Fish remains.
Insect remains.
Resins and glues.
Antler and horn.
Water.

 

[Moonbear]

I have to agree with Chronos on this one. You can only use carbon-14 dating on organic material, not stone or ceramic, or any other inorganic material. So that right away discredits the story. Second, when I saw the first collection of images at the top of the page, I thought everything in the first two columns looked like roughly the same type of dinosaur figure. They're pretty generic looking, so the claim that one was an Iguanodon is pretty baseless. You could have interchanged anyone of those next to the artist renderings of the various species of dinosaur.

I would also have to say that was a pretty clever farmer if he was managing to excavate real archaeological findings without damaging the pottery and found all the pieces of broken pottery and knew which pieces went together in order to glue them together before handing them over.

Yep, looks like a hoax to me, and not even a very good one.

 

[Moonbear]

force majeure, carbon dating of pottery is not directly of the pottery itself, but of material found within the pottery. See this site for more information on how pottery is dated: http://www.dur.ac.uk/lumin.dating/potdate.htm

A large amount of pottery from the 1st millennium BC in Britain is difficult to date since it is generally unremarkable. For example, in the East Midlands, the same styles and fabrics remained in use through many centuries. It is therefore difficult for archaeologists to construct sequences of the development of the pottery, with which new finds can be compared and dated. Even where such sequences have been constructed, the seuqences may be 'floating' with no fixed chronological markers.

Direct scientific dating of the pottery can provide these markers, giving information on the rates of changes of styles and testing the validity of the pottery typologies..Unfortunately, there are difficulties in applying radiocarbon dating to this problem. Firstly it is rare to be able to date the pottery directly, for example by dating organic matter taken from the fabric of the pot or charcoal scraped from the surface of the pot. Ssecondly, radiocarbon ages need to be calibrated and the calibration curve has a flat spot in the 1st millennium BC; for example, calibrating a radiocarbon date of 2500 ± 80 BP gives a very wide range: 800-400 BC.

 

[force majeure]

@moon bear:

of course! that is quite palpable.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nuclear/cardat.html

Carbon dating is a variety of radioactive dating which is applicable only to matter which was once living and presumed to be in equilibrium with the atmosphere, taking in carbon dioxide from the air for photosynthesis.

but the point of contention here was whether it can be used on stones...

the above list i think settles the question.

 

[Eyes R. Rollin]

Hi all! I am new to this group, but have an interest in the Acambaro figures that goes way back (my actual name was taken in vain in the article linked to in the first message of the thread). First off, radiocarbon dating of ceramic materials always yields an age older than the pottery because that carbon was present in the clay deposit before being dug for the purpose of making the pottery. It is NOT from smoke and soot originating in the wood used in firing in this sort of material -- which is oxidized on the exterior, shading to gray/black in the interior (from clay deposit carbon residuals). Only if the carbon were on the outside, from smoke and ash on cooking vessels, or organic contents of cooking/storage vessels, would the carbon be expected to be contemporary vegetal material and liable to yield a useful radiocarbon age. I last remember somebody attempting dating pottery this way in a paper presented at the Archaeometry meeting at Univ of Illinois Champaigne/Urbana back in 1995 or 6. It had to do with dating of a pottery kiln in Peru, and dates obtained were considerably in excess of the archaeological/TL ages. Furthermore, many early radiocarbon dates suffered from inadequate sample prep (removal of humic acid, etc.) and there were--are still are--outliers due to contamination.

Secondly, the early 70's TL 'ages' from Penn were very bad science, published in the museum's un-refereed newsletter. The authors were ill-equipped to do this sort of work properly (ignoring published research) and so mistook non-radiation-induced ('spurious') signals for TL and computed a TL age in error. Even at that time anyone up to speed on the work then being done at Oxford University and other centers would have recognized that the signals observed were not TL but interference (the old 'plateau test' where the naturally produced signal and an artificially produced calibration irradiation-produced signal must have the same shape in the high temperature region in order to claim the natural signal is actually TL and usable for dating). In any case the curves shown in the original publication caused eyes to roll among those seriously involved in TL research at the time. Carriveau later showed that the spurious signal regenerates, at least in part, with exposure to oxygen and water vapor within a short time, and very likely would eventually give the equivalent of the naturally-occuring signal. He did make an argument that the regeneration would take approximately the 40 years between when the objects were excavated and when he made the measurements, but it would very difficult to establish that with any precision. I have done this myself with Acambaro material and see a similar effect. I originally did this work in the 70's and was able only to establish a poor upper limit to the TL age (West Mexican pottery is notoriously poor for TL dating because of its low sensitivity to radiation and propensity to spurious signal production), while stating that the signal observed was clearly spurious and that the actual age was much more recent than the very conservative upper limits, and that if regeneration was taken into consideration the maximum possible age would be younger still. Of course my results were misquoted and willfully misinterpreted. I only saw the article yesterday. I have actually revisited this material recently with many more samples and the benefit of 25-30 years more experience, and to my mind got much more satisfying results, which I will share when I am given permission. Keep up the good work. Sorry for all the parentheses.

 

[TheGreenMan]

also check this out:

In the 1940s and 1950s the Iguanodon was completely unknown. No hoaxer could have known of the Iguanodon existence much less made a model, for it wasn't until 1978 of 1979 that skeletons of adult Iguanodons were found with nests and babies.

OK old post but I just had to laugh at this.
Iguanodon compleatly unknown in the 1940s?!

Here is the real deal:

Iguanodon was named by Gideon A. Mantell in 1825; its teeth and a few bones were found in 1822 (perhaps by Gideon Mantell's wife, Mrs Mary Mantell) in Sussex, (southern) England. Mantell recognized the similarity between Iguanodon's tooth and that of the modern iguana, except the Iguanodon's was much larger. Iguanodon was the second dinosaur fossil named, and Mantell named it Iguanodon, meaning "iguana tooth." Hundreds of Iguanodon fossils have been found around the world, especially in Belgium, England, Germany, North Africa, and the USA. The type species, I. bernissartensis , was named by Boulenger and van Beneden in 1881.