God almighty one takes a week out on the road and a mild suggestion for a discussion on chronometric methods mutates into a flame-war about whether the Bible is a theological basis for the existence of the state of Israel...

If I may try to get this back on track:

Ian wrote:

I only added recalculated Intcal09 calibration data based on the radiocarbon dates as given in their own table 1.

Recalculated how? Do you have access to the IntCal09 program?

and:

The so-called "weighted" date ranges (1215-1190 BC and 1180-1160 BC) you cite from the article are utterly false. You can only weigh data of similar origin, in this case RC data. .... But whatever the case, you cannot "weigh" RC with chronological and astronomical data, especially not if it's those data which need to be tested! Weighted date ranges also do not differ dramatically from the general trend of the source date ranges, especially not if these are already quite homogeneous. The authors have weighed in non-RC data.

You are reading into the article something that isn't there. They do not describe the calibrated dates as weighted. The word only appears in the phrase weighted average date (2962+/-14 ¹⁴C years BP) -- the raw RC readings. If you take the 8 sample dates from layer 7A, listed in both figure 3 and Table 1, and calculate the arithmetic mean you get (drum-roll).... 2962 years. The only weighting involved is that three of the samples give the same RC date. To accuse the authors of weighting their data by non-RC factors when all they did was to apply ordinary arithmetic to RC dates is excessive and undermines the credibility of your critique.

I agree that the statement of how they did the calibration, with its references to somehow using both OxCal and IntCal, is unclear. If they took the mean of OxCal and IntCal results, as you seem to be saying, then that would indeed be invalid -- but it's far from clear that that's what they did. If they took two sets of readings and compared them using some well-established cross-correlation techniques (as the mention of Calib-Rev seems to imply -- I haven't come across Calib-Rev before) then that's just validating the IntCal calibration, which is another matter entirely.

It's basically the same trickery (if not treachery) as the so-called Bayesian formula

Apparently you reject Bayesian statistics on principle. I agree they can lead one astray, but to dismiss them as "trickery" and "treachery" smacks of Luddism.


Getting back to the paper, my impressions when I read it was that the application of KTU 1.78 and a low Egyptian chronology are at least naive, and that seems to be the consensus here. But on the RC side I think it would be more productive to try to arrive at a clear understanding of how the authors actually calibrated the dates than to accuse them of deliberately fudging the results.

Chris