#3 MEdia Dating Old Stuff....

So today in Media Literacy Class I had mention a method for dating cave paintings, and I thought I would share a couple of the different methods of dating old paintings, such as cave paintings.

To me I really do not understand how people can't understand the concept of cave paintings, or dinosaurs, or evolution. I am all for religion, but the Bible can not be take literally. If it was taken literally because if that was the case I would really like to see the creature depicted in Revelation 17:7-18 (shown above). I don't think that in the Bible there is a sense of time. The time it took for the story of 7 days in Genesis could have taken hundreds of thousands of years in our time. There is proof of bones of animals or creatures from prehistoric times that date way before 6,000 years going based on the "New Earth" theory. Just like we had stated in our presentation today, the earliest form of media is word of mouth, and the bible would have started from word of mouth and story telling, and who would know what happened in those first few days unless they were there. I could just be rambling, but this is what seems right to me.

The pigment that was used to do different cave paintings had a couple different components to it, for example there were a couple different options for holding the pigment together. Which included: water, vegetable juices, urine, animal fat, bone marrow, blood, and albumen.

RADIO CARBON DATING:
"It is possible to directly date these organic carbon black pigments, due to a rather long process that aims to separate a sample’s inorganic carbon coming from the limestone support (calcium carbonate, CaCO3, not useful for dating) from the pigment’s organic carbon component. This method allows dating back to thousands of years with an error of just one century. Compare it with indirect methods, generally used by archaeologists, which give errors in the order of thousands of years!" For More information check out this website at: Pigment Through the Ages.

OTHER METHOD:
" The team from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology travelled to northern Spain to collect samples of paintings from more than 20 caves.
They will use a new method, based on the radioactive decay of uranium, to date the paintings.
Samples have been taken from the cave of Tito Bustillo in Asturias and La Pasiega Cave in Cantabria.
Dr Alistair Pike, the project leader said: "These cave paintings are one of the most intimate windows into the minds of people who lived more than 15,000 years ago, but have proved extremely difficult to date.

It's not unusual for us to spend 10 hours a day underground, but the paintings are so spectacular it's always worth it Dr Alistair Pike

"Traditional methods of dating the pigments, such as radiocarbon, are destructive to the paintings, and the samples are prone to contamination.
"We are using a new method that can date thin calcite layers that have formed over the surface of the paintings." "
BBC


Sources:
http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/early.html