27 - The View from Mount Nebo

Summary

Editor's note: At the end of the Yarnton Conference, Andrew Sherratt was asked to sum up the meeting as someone who, while interested in its conclusions, was not immediately engaged in its disputes. This is what he said.

You may be asking—and quite rightly—why I have been nominated to sum up this expert and distinguished set of contributions. Surely no single human being could wrap his head around the complexities of nuclear physics, dendrochronology, ceramic sequences, stratigraphy, and biblical history. Quite so. Yet in one respect I am uniquely qualified to comment on these proceedings. The Oxford radiocarbon lab undertakes a certain amount of work as a service to members of the British archaeological community to provide dates for particularly promising pieces of research, scrutinised by an external committee. When Tom was on sabbatical here at Yarnton, we discussed his project and I agreed to front an application on dating the Early Iron Age in Jordan. It was an excellent application, and passed to and fro between us several times, first in black and white and then in colour versions of some of the wonderful illustrations you saw yesterday. It was quite the most comprehensive application ever received by the committee. They agreed that it was magnificent, and had only one objection: the named principal investigator clearly had no first-hand knowledge of the problem, and no standing in the specialist field.