In issue 9 of Atlantis Rising, some doubts were raised regarding the accuracy of the C14 dating method used on the shroud of Turin. In the minds of many Christians, and, undoubtedly, the curator in possession of the shroud, the dating of this artifact cannot depend on methods that are unpredictable. How accurate is the C14 dating method? And what else can be inferred from its development about our history?

If our civilization was to become extinct by natural disaster, such as a polar displacement or self-inflicted nuclear war, after 10,000 years future generations would have few clues as to the level of sophistication we had achieved. It would be fair to say that many of our artifacts would be misinterpreted and misunderstood. What would remain of the concrete jungles we call cities? Would they reveal to future archeologists the full scope of the technology we had achieved? Future civilizations, after rising from the ashes of bare remnants of what we had become, will be busy developing their own technology. This development may be along a different path than ours has followed, and in its early stages it wouldn't be as advanced. At what stage in their evolution would future archeologists recognize a computer chip for what it really is?

The artifacts that survive thousands of years after the demise of a highly developed civilization would, in large part depend on the level of technology that had been achieved. After the ravages of time, many of our artifacts will have crumbled into dust. If they are able to analyze and interpret them correctly, some of our plastics and high-tech exotic alloys may provide future generations with clues that form a rough sketch of the society we now enjoy. It is safe to say, though, that any high-tech artifacts under study by a future generation may be misinterpreted for hundreds of years until the technology needed to correctly interpret them has been developed.

Contained within some less than high-tech surviving artifacts will be a subtle clue which advanced civilizations such as ours are forced to leave behind. This clue is the amount of C14 in a piece of wood, bone or other organic material that had lived and breathed the atmosphere since the dawn of our nuclear age. C14 is created when the reaction of cosmic rays with the ionosphere precipitates neutrons through the atmosphere. These neutrons react with nitrogen 14, creating C14. Upon creation, C14 starts to decay, and originally was determined to have a half-life of approximately 5,568 years. (The half-life of radiocarbon was redefined from 5570, plus or minus 30 years, to 5730, plus or minus 40 years, in 1962.) Organic material takes in C14 at a constant rate, and, knowing what the level of C14 in an object was before it died, scientists can measure the amount left in it and calculate its age. Apart from normal variations, C14 stays at a constant level in the Earth's atmosphere. Industrial and nuclear activities have increased the level of C14 in the atmosphere, and subsequently everything that lives and breathes.

When Willard F. Libby first discovered radiocarbon dating in 1947, archeologists, and especially Egyptologists, ignored it. They questioned its reliability, as it did not coincide with the known historical dates of the artifacts being tested. David Wilson, author of The New Archeology (Knopf. NY 1974) writes:

Some archeologists refused to accept radiocarbon dating. The attitude of the majority, probably, in the early days of the new technique was summed up by Professor Jo Brew, Director of the Peabody Museum at Harvard. If a C14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it is completely out-of-date we just drop it.

The radiocarbon time scale contains other uncertainties also, and errors as great as 2000 to 5000 years may occur. Contamination of the artifact may be caused by percolating groundwater, incorporation of older or younger carbon, and contamination in the field or laboratory. Willard Libby addressed the problem of contamination and the ability to distinguish between the chemistries of life and death (the chemistries of death being the contamination). Washing techniques were then developed to separate the two.

Egyptologists are generally agreed, within 20 years or so, on the dates they had established for the time of the pharaohs. Consequently, when radiocarbon dating came back with a result that showed artifacts to be between two and five hundred years younger than their established historical dates, they were not impressed. In other words, articles with a known date of 5,000 years were tested and, according to radiocarbon dating were found to be only 4,500 years old. The wood from Tutankhamun's tomb, historically dated at around 1350 B.C., gave a C14 reading of 1050 B.C.

The further back into history the C14 researchers went, the larger the discrepancy became. The original assumption on which C14 dating was based is that its level in the atmosphere is the same at all times. Egyptologists and the carbon dating scientists were, therefore, in contradiction with each other. The Egyptologists and the archeologists wouldn't budge, and so the scientists were forced to reevaluate their findings. What the scientists needed, in order for C14 dating to be accepted as a useful archeological tool, was a method of calibrating it accurately. Until this could be accomplished, doubt would prevail.

The answer came in the form of tree ring dating, and the tree that was to provide the means to accomplish this was the bristle-cone pine, indigenous to the Southwestern United States. Being the oldest living tree on earth, the bristle-cone pine enabled scientists to develop the chronology to calibrate carbon dating and adjust the clock. The results were noteworthy. It turned out that the Egyptologists and the archeologists were correct in their dates and the original C14 results were in error. In some cases, for distant dates, the error was as much as 800 years. David Wilson sums up the reasons for the discrepancy:

If present-day measurements of the radiocarbon remaining in objects which died in, say, 2,500 B.C. give a date of 2,000 B.C., then there is too much C14 left undecayed, perhaps it is that there was too much C14 in the object originally in 2,500 B.C. This is now generally accepted as being the case, but that still leaves the question open as to why there was more C14 in the atmosphere and biosphere.

The question may still be open, although it was speculated that variations in the Earth's magnetic field allowed increased amounts of cosmic rays to react with the ionosphere.

When carbon dating was first being developed, samples were collected from around the world. The stipulation on the kind of samples that were collected was that they had died and ceased to draw carbon in from the atmosphere before the advent of our industrial age, and especially before nuclear testing had been carried out. The explosion of nuclear devices releases neutrons and would raise the level of C14 in the atmosphere. Tree ring dating had revealed that there was an elevation of C14 in the atmosphere and in artifacts older than 1,000 years B.C. that had thrown off the atomic clock. Around 8,000 to 10,000 years B.C. the level of C14 started to fall back to normal.

Is the high level of C14 in prehistoric artifacts a smoking gun left behind by an industrial infrastructure that supported a high civilization 10,000 years ago? In my article An Engineer in Egypt, (Atlantis Rising #8) I presented evidence to support the proposition that the ancient Egyptians may have used ultrasonics to machine granite. I also describe artifacts found in Egypt with a geometry and precision that moves us beyond the question how was the granite cut? to ask, what guided the cutting tool? In 1882 when Sir William Flinders Petrie was puzzling over the artifacts that present this evidence to us, the machine tool industry was in its infancy and ultrasonic machining did not exist. Petrie admitted that he was at a loss to explain the manufacturing methods used to create many of the artifacts he was studying. In terms of technical accomplishment, the artifacts speak for themselves. They speak of an industry that, like us, would produce more C14 in the atmosphere than what is produced through natural causes. That such an industry may have started to form almost 10,000 years B.C., gives a more reasonable time frame to support a premise that the devices that were used in the creation of these artifacts, along with the other accoutrements associated with a high civilization, had degraded to extinction.

A complete interpretation of a civilization such as ours is beyond the scope of one individual, or group of individuals, who are trained in only one discipline. Archeologists and Egyptologists have interpreted and explained artifacts surviving ancient civilizations from a narrow perspective. This has resulted in a belief that our own civilization is the first to develop technology that uses electricity as a means of performing work. From this premise, evidence, such as the granite artifacts found in Egypt, which demand that we include the possibility of such knowledge existing in prehistory, has been misinterpreted, disregarded or overlooked.

Chris Dunn has worked in manufacturing of 35 years as a machinist, tool-maker and engineer. His analysis of the machining capabilities of the ancient Egyptians was featured in Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods. His E-mail address is: CDunn1546@aol.com.