6,000-Year-Old Archeological Site Discovered in Sarvestan, Iran

I am not an ancient civilization expert, but saw this and am posting for those who are interested in this subject....


[edit on 8/17/04 by JacKatMtn]

I have always wondered how does one guage the age of what amounts to stone and earthenware? I understand (sort of) the principle of carbon dating for things that were once alive, but how do you come up with a age for stone?

- Was

for potery and such the only way to date it is to have relative pottery that you can date for sure and then compare the two

I don't rememer it clearly, it has to do with some cycle, during which they change theirselves, so by identifiy which cycle they are in you can tell their age, but not really clear about this method.

I think they look at the chemicals in the rock and they date those.

i am not sure but i think u date stone by something to do with its half-life
i am sure some of you smarts out there can confirm or deny this?...but i think it has something to do with all elements/atoms only being stable for a certain amount of time or something and then they start to breakdown/decompose and this causes a reaction that is measurable in some sort of way..i.e if it is ..so and so a material then its half life is..so and so..so if it has started to breakdown/decompose then the the age is recognizable..or something like that m8..i think..lol
hopefully some1 can clear this up for me as well..lol?
i am pretty sure they have carbon dated stuff much older than 6000yrs
i have also heard about a better dating system than this but cant remember off hand

[edit on 16-8-2004 by Heratix]

I beleive that the methods used for dating archaeological remains can often be controversial. Radiometric dating of course is nice, because it allows for absolute ages, however carbon dating can't be used on rocks, it can only be used on previously organic remains. I think its possible that the heating/glazing process of ceramics might 'reset' the istopic clock (melting rocks effectively does this, I am thinking it may apply here). Otherwise I would think that they take the sites with known ages and try to back track and correlate to other known sites.

However any paper in a journal on this site would have the explicit methods used to date these items.

It certainly is exciting to have more information on a time so long ago.

You can guage the age of something like this by what layer of sediment, etc. its buried in. Thus, each layer represents a certain timeperiod so that if something is, say, 20 ft. down it means its 6,000 years old. Something 10 ft. down would only be 3,000 years...and so on.

This is a pretty good method of determining age if the different layers of dirt or strata have specific time period allocated to them.

You can also find the age of pottery by determining which way the tiny magnetic particles are pointing. Upon the heating of the pot the magnetic principles of the pot are skewed and when cooled they point in either a NORTH-SOUTH direction. By this one can determine what the actual magnetic north and south were at the time of the creation of the pot, and thereby know its true age. This method is only reliable on very old archaeological items though.

[edit on 17-8-2004 by Jazzerman]

They would determine the age of the site through multiple processes. There's a pretty good summarization (and in laymans terms) of the methods on the NPSAEP website under the ARCHEOLOGY FOR INTERPRETERS section. Another pretty good source of information can be found on encarta's website.

Basically, to determine an absolute date of a site that's less than 7,000 years old, you can always depend on radio carbon dating. This is especially true when it comes to earthen pottery because of how it was made (partices of various organic matter were mixed in the clay to give it different cooking properties when it was cooked in a kiln, stuff like grass, seeds, crop husks, etc., or, decorative items like shells, bones, etc). Pottery is simply heated mud (clay), it's not melted (700-900 degrees doesn't melt rock) so the particles left over have a very precise radio carbon signature that's basically from the day it was cooked.

Hope some of this was helpful to you.

I think it was an interesting find.