00:00.66 archpodnet Hello and welcome back to the pseudo archeology podcast episode 111 and I'm your host Dr Andrew King Cullo which I believe I didn't say last time but it's kind of understood at this point so we were talking about. The mail that I get from my listeners and specifically one that I really appreciated about the sphinx about dating the sphinx you know and how we would really do this now. The listener did at at first have some questions about erosion. You know how. Like does real does modern archeology use erosion as a dating method and my answer would be mostly no and what I mean by that and what we really have to realize when we're dating something like this phanx or anything in archeology. Is. We're going to use everything we have right? We're going to use as many dating methods as possible if we have carbon fourteen, we're going to use it if we have potassium ourgon we're gonna use it. You know if we have um, artifacts that date to a certain time. We're going to use those we use it all and. We hope that everything generally crosses at a certain date range which in my experience the huge ah percentage of that it really does and it's super satisfying when it happens you know you're like hey man job well done. We're actually using science. 01:33.87 archpodnet Found some artifacts. We found some stuff stuff. We can date and it all seems to be from a thousand years ago or whatever it may be in the case of the sphinx all right? So what do I mean with erosion mostly now what I mean is all those other things I listed. Like the types of artifacts you find in association with it. Um, any carbon 14 dating if you can do it and there are other other dating methods methods too. They're all better than just trying to guess at erosion. Because there's so many factors of erosion erosion happens on a geological scale right? thousands upon thousands of years with erosion you're not going to get some date range of like oh plus or minus two years you're not going to get that right? It's thousands upon thousands of years it depends on. Formation of the stone itself and again I went over this last time you know that really just straight looking at erosion on something is is not a good way to go. It's better than nothing. So if we had no other dating method. But all we could do would be to look at the side of the sphinx and how much it was eroded I would be like okay, right? Let's do it and they were saying it took you know 10000 years or something like that and I'd be cool with that if we had nothing better but we have a. 03:02.49 archpodnet Ton of stuff that's better to date that first we have we have the context right? This is where in time and space the sphinx is and what it's related to so the sphinx is obviously related to all that other stuff. all the all the pyramids and and the. Buildings right? nearby on the giza plateau and in those buildings and in the layers that relate to the Sphinx. We have artifacts from the time that the sphinx is from right meaning like you can find bits of pottery. You can find broken tools this kind of thing. That all date to the old kingdom to a round. Oh you know if you want to round it around 2500 bc give or take you know is it 2600 bc is it 2400 bc it's right in there so four and a half thousand years ago so we have really good what I would call contextual data or cultural data meaning that human beings made these tools human beings made this pottery and we can find it in association with the sphyx meaning related to the sphinx of close by to the sphinx. It just makes natural sense but you could say hey ah you're just associating. It. You're not dating the actual sphinx itself and that is true right. 04:32.29 archpodnet But what you'll find is so much of archaeology works through association like that and we feel very good about making that kind of association making that kind of leap because everything is in that instance, it's sort of contained in the same place in space. So we really can get. Good dates and as I talk about good dates realize that we are almost never getting to the year okay that's a common misnomer with dating. You know the only time that you can possibly do that. Well there's 2 times I mean if you have. Tree ring dating that's perfect right on but that's very rare or if you have some sort of written records that a human being wrote it and said hey this year this happened um but even that human beings lie damn them. And they're lying ways but either lying or not that those are pretty damn good. But in the world of carbon 14 and these other what we'll call radio metric dating methods. They all have a range and when we go into the deep dive on that I'll I'll talk a little about that range by range I mean. Oh plus or minus a hundred years or plus or minus thirty years right they're all going to have that range. We're not getting this to the year but I am completely satisfied with how the sphinx is dating now if the context thing doesn't. 06:05.22 archpodnet Make a hundred percent sense to you think of it like this um a thousand years from now you go to New York and you're digging at the place where the world trade center once stood and you find these 2 huge. Um, ah. 06:35.37 archpodnet Foundations of buildings that were once there and even with all the cleanup. Maybe you still find some debris there. You know as they've as they covered it over. And you can't date those foundations because they're just you know they're just made out of concrete. Let's say you have you can't find anything else. You're gonna find a bunch of artifacts right? there though that come from the late 1990 s and maybe into 2000 or even 2001 right now, you're not going to be able to date it perfectly. But you're going to be like I find a lot of human material from like the 90 s now sure you're going to find some ah a little bit of stuff from before you know if you dig deep enough. Oh there's a bit of a train tunnel that was built in 1889 or something but overall. You're going going to find a pile of stuff from you know the couple decades before the building itself was built in the 70 s you know in the sixty s into the 70 s so you are just going to find a ton of artifacts from that and maybe a few more from afterwards. But you're going to find a bunch from a certain time period right. So that's how you're going to date that culturally, you're not dating the foundation of the twin towers specifically right? But you're dating. You're using all the artifacts to give you a guess and you're going to get a really good guess just based on the the amount of artifacts there right? That's that's. 08:04.38 archpodnet Ah, sort of contextual kind of cultural dating using these artifacts now. Yes, we can do that with the sphinx. But guess what we can do better because the sphinx was actually made with a bunch of mortar. Especially on the inner parts of it to stick this stuff together and inside the mortar and inside the voids and stuff where the construction workers were just filling stuff in there are bits of broken pieces of pottery and bits of of tools from the time which of course. All date to the old kingdom about 25 or sorry forty five hundred years ago 2500 Bc they all date to that. But I can even do you one better. There were a couple bits of charcoal in it too. So we can carbon 14 date parts of the sphinx. That's great. Because the charcoal was in the mortar and they even found little plant fragments and stuff too. So remember that carbon 14 can only be used on things that were once living once organic right? organic matter so we actually have that and they did do they did run some of this stuff. They ran it for the sphinx. And they ran it for ah some of the stuff they found like in some of the other pyramids and Giza like giza plateau stuff. They ran a bunch of these carbon 14 dates and initially they came off as ah, 2 to 300 years too old now. 09:32.56 archpodnet Let me stop right? there and say check this out. We're nowhere near that 10000 year line we're nowhere near that. Oh the sphinx is ancient look at the water erosion right? That is all completely out the window total b s they are wrong right. Done now we're having the argument that real scientists actually have which is like hey this is about 200 years too old like I wonder why right Of course they the Pseudo Archeology world will cherry pick this and go archeologists. Don't agree on age of sphinx ages thinks too old. But they'll never say by 200 years not 10000 years right so typical So what's the deal with this. You're 2 to 300 years old I would have been fine with it I just look at 2 3 hundred years old no big deal. You know there would. There's just a little bit of incorrect dating. But there's an article from 2009 in the in the um in. 10:38.41 archpodnet In the journal article radio carbon now this is the one that takes the deep dive you can tell by the title in the car. The carbon fourteen world and I've done some of this I prep samples and stuff so I can actually hang with this and. The reason why you pay me the big bucks is so I can kind of translate this for you guys. So in the 2009 issue and I will link this below in the comments. They a group of scientists they took those original dates that were 2 to 300 years too old and they ran them through a program called oxcal. Which I really like I think it's the best 1 and it's just this is a carbon 14 how you run your dates to to kind of narrow them to get the best you can and they did a Bayesian analysis now bayesian analysis. It gets really technical. But basically it's just where they can use. Certain facts that they know about that time period to narrow the date a little more. You're still going to have a range but they narrowed it some. It can be done based on the stetigraphy where where the carbon 14 samples were found and sort of so on and so forth. It's it's a way of. Narrowing your dates a bit now. Why do you need to narrow your dates in the first place it's because there's a thing called a calibration curve which is when you get a carbon 14 date back how it works is. It's recording how much of the carbon 14 isotope. 12:11.73 archpodnet Has degraded away from when the thing was alive and in a perfect world. Ah you would just measure how much it's degraded and you're like oh it's 2156 years old in a perfect world. That's true but carbon 14 degrades. It's like. The world that the carbon 14 is in the the amount of carbon 14 in it varies a tiny bit over the years and decades and centuries right? It varies a little so when you date something. There's what's called a calibration curve and what sucks is. The curve is not completely nice and smooth. It's a little wiggly so there are certain times where what that means is it's called an intercept. It's it's where that piece dates to and if it dates to a really wiggly piece of the curve. It. It gives you a more wide date That's basically what happens and there's certain time periods where this happens much more I know this from the Maya World I have some stuff that we did that dates around two fifty bc and there's a bunch of wiggling there and I'm like damn it so much wiggling. But there's other points I in time I think I dated something about a. Thousand a d much smoother date much more narrow. So what? the basing modeling does is it takes out some of the wiggles. It's like your date corresponds to wiggle one 3 so you know 1 3 6 9 and 12 and you're like shit you know? Ah, but then they can narrow it down and be like hey. 13:46.33 archpodnet Date it corresponds definitely to only wiggle one and 3 you're like nice right? So that's that's sort of evening out some of the some of the dithering and radiocarbon dating that doesn't make radiocarbon dating bad I love carbon 14 dating. Right? You've heard me talk about it before here. It's great and with basing and modeling you can narrow it down that much more so to only a portion right of the wiggly line so where it was once plus or minus one hundred years now. Maybe it's only plus or minus 40 rty years and so they did that they modeled that with these dates and that bumped the dates up just a little bit. The other thing that can often make radiocarbon dates or carbon 14 dates date just a little too old is a version of what's called the old wood problem like what if that would that is dated. Is from a tree that was 300 years old when it was cut down. You see what I'm saying it'll it might be a piece that dates to when the tree was new not to when you actually used it. You. It's like if the day if the tree was planted in 0 a d. Chop down in 300 a d and that's when it was used. You might burn a piece of that and it'll give you a date of 0 a d does that make sense. You guys see how it gives you a little bit old and that can be a function of some of this too when you see dates that are a little too old sometimes that can be true. We have this. 15:20.54 archpodnet Kind of unwritten rule in archeology if you have a choice for a carbon 14 date of wood. You want to try and find a little tiny little stick from the tree. Not a huge part of the trunk because that will get your date that much closer. So just kind of interesting bit. There. So ultimately. With the narrowing of the carbon 14 dates from ah pee plant material found in the sphinx itself in the mortar you get dates that go I wrote them down just for laughs. They narrowed it to between 25 enty five fifty eight and 23 61 bc that is the um. 2 sigma that means that that is the 95% probability which is really really high and that is right in? Ah, ah, coffra rain is from twenty five fifty eight to twenty five thirty two so it's it's right in there you guys and now we can argue. Was the sphinx made during ca rain slightly before slightly after sure we can have those arguments all day right? What does the sphx ultimately mean how does it relate to giza. We can. We can go to town on all that. But in terms of the date of the sphinx itself. It is right in. Fourth dynasty. Old kingdom case closed when we return what to do with the dating of the sphinx.