Zahi Hawass on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #2321

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

The claim that radiocarbon dating has never given accurate results and does not work in Egypt is contradicted by peer-reviewed research. The 2010 Science study by Bronk Ramsey and colleagues used 211 radiocarbon measurements on short-lived plant remains with Bayesian modeling and independently corroborated the historically derived Egyptian chronology, reducing some uncertainties to under 20 years. A 2013 Proceedings of the Royal Society A study likewise produced an absolute radiocarbon chronology for early Egypt that, in the authors' words, concurs with prevailing archaeological analysis. There is a real caveat: earlier pyramid radiocarbon projects (1984 and 1995), on which Hawass was a co-author, found dates that ran several hundred years too old, but researchers attributed this to the old wood problem (builders reusing aged organic material) and a small Nile Valley growing-season offset, not to any failure of the method itself. When short-lived samples from secure contexts are used, radiocarbon dating agrees well with Egyptian chronology, so the blanket claim that it never works is inaccurate.