What Difference Does a Century Make?

Recently some archaeologists have been saying that the tenth century B.C.E. is really the ninth century B.C.E. I asked a visiting archaeologist what this means: How could archaeologists have misplaced an entire century? He told me that it had to do with the relative dating of pottery assemblages, the imprecision of radiocarbon tests, and the lack of absolute dates or synchronisms. He also confessed that archaeologists do a lot of guessing. This confirmed my suspicion that sometimes scholarly consensus is buttressed by wishful thinking. Since qualified archaeologists disagree among themselves on whether we should move the archaeological chronology downward, […]