Three-age System - Dating

Dating

The question of the dates of the objects and events discovered through archaeology is certainly the prime concern of any system of thought that seeks to summarize history through the formulation of ages or epochs. An age is defined through comparison of contemporaneous events. If the events selected are not contemporaneous then any grouping of them does not enable synthesis of history but rather contributes to the formulation of another myth. The myths of archaeologists have long been a subject of ridicule.

Even this ridicule fuels an expanding and ever more determined industry by the scientific community to discover accurate chronological relationships between events based on their material evidence long after the fact. Epochalization is in fact the creation of history. Increasingly the terminology of archaeology is parallel to that of historical method. An event is "undocumented" until it turns up in the archaeological record. Fossils and artifacts are "documents" of the epochs hypothesized. The correction of dating errors is therefore a major concern.

In the case where parallel epochs defined in history were available, elaborate efforts were made to align European and Near Eastern sequences with the datable chronology of Ancient Egypt and other known civilizations. The resulting grand sequence was also spot checked by evidence of calculateable solar or other astronomical events. These methods are only available for the relatively short term of recorded history. Most prehistory does not fall into that category.

Physical science provides at least two general groups of dating methods, stated below. Data collected by these methods is intended to provide an absolute chronology to the framework of periods defined by relative chronology. Although it can be used to correct the relative chronologies, it can never by definition be used to replace those chronologies.