How do we know how old our items are? Item Number: 100019 $0.00

DescriptionThis week’s topic is based on a suggestion from one of our clients. His thoughtful question is – “how do we know the dating of the various artifacts we sell?”

Like almost all dealers of ancient art, we rely on others to tell us the dating of virtually everything we sell. We pour through existing published material trying to find items that look similar to base our dating. In almost every circumstance, another item similar to what we are selling has been found, studied, identified, dated and probably sold. Examples of most of what we offer can be found in auction catalogs, other galleries inventory or on the Internet. Where we may run into trouble is when we come across things that do not have an exact parallel. Often in those cases, we get skeptical real fast because those tend to be the items that are not authentic!

But that does not answer the bigger question – who decided on these dates, and how was it determined? To answer this, I am reprinting an article I found on the web from wisegeek.com. They are indeed wise… Here is how they answer the question:

“The human race has been around for at least a couple hundred thousand years, perhaps longer. However, we only invented writing in 5000 BCE, and even then, few people were literate and archival methods were very poor. Therefore, information of about 99% of our human history can only be retrieved through the study of artifacts and fossils. To understand where a given artifact fits into the scheme of history requires dating it with a reliable degree of precision. Luckily, there exist good methods to do so.

The earliest method of dating artifacts is to look at which strata of rock they are found within. There exist large databases that tell us which artifacts corresponding to which civilizations are found in certain layers of soil, often giving us context for dating an artifact. The business of archeology is careful for this reason - to accurately determine the layer in which the artifact is found, each layer must be removed carefully during the dig. Unevenness in the soil and rock can complicate dating by stratification.

Another method for dating artifacts is called typology, which simply means the study of types. In typology, a researcher studies the material of an artifact, its form, and its likely purpose. Due to technological necessity, more complex artifacts are newer than simpler artifacts, so often an artifact can be dated simply by looking what it is made of and how sophisticated a process went into making it. If the artifact is from a civilization that possessed written records, dating is even easier because there are textual clues as to which artifacts were produced during which eras.

The most powerful method of artifact dating is carbon-14 dating. Because this method only works on once living things, it can only be used to date organic artifacts or bits of organic material located next to the find. Carbon-14 is a carbon isotope, found in about one out of every trillion carbon atoms.

Organisms take in carbon-14 naturally while they are alive. When they die, they stop absorbing it. Because carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,000 years, it slowly decays and its frequency declines as the organic material is buried. Determining the exact quantity of carbon-14 in a sample can give a very close approximation of the date when it was created.”

I think this is a pretty decent explanation of the topic, but hopefully over the next couple of weeks I can get deeper into this subject. Curious minds want to know!

Happy collecting!
Bob Dodge