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?

3 comments

3 Comments

stellaa692mo ago

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

mark_price1mo ago

Ask @johnson.faith if those other two pieces were under the same sealed layer or just in the same general area. If they came from different spots in the site, it makes the argument stronger. But if they're all from one little pocket, then it's pretty easy to explain away as a weird intrusion or a contamination issue nobody caught. I'm asking because I've seen a single weird find get blown up into a whole revisionist history on weak evidence before. How many total artifacts are we talking from that sealed layer?

johnson.faith2mo 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.