My sister refuses to believe those ancient artifacts found from Roman times are real, she thinks scientists or archeologists just made it up to sell them. Help me prove her wrong.
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Archaeologists do not sell artifacts. Archaeologists beg, borrow, and steal to get the money needed to go, dig them out of the ground, and then donate them to museums. If you try to sell truly interesting artifacts, they will add you to the skeletons in the basement of the same museum.
It is true that there are people out there who fake ancient artifacts sometimes using some very sophisticated techniques. The archaeologists hate them and do everything they can to expose them.
I am not sure why she would want to believe that the artifacts are fake. Does she believe that humans didn’t exist until 50 years ago? If humans lived long ago, where does she think the artifacts went? Even if she is a young earth Creationist, even they say that the Bible says that humans have been on earth for roughly 4,000 years before the Roman Empire.
That said, probably our best method of measuring the age of artifacts is carbon dating.
Normal carbon lasts just about forever. However, when exposed to sunlight as CO2, some of it transforms into carbon-14.
Carbon-14 is radioactive, and when it breaks down it turns into nitrogen.
If a living thing is alive and breathing, it breathes in the carbon-14 in the atmosphere that is created by the sun. Doing this keeps a fairly even level of carbon-14 in its body.
When it dies, the carbon-14 does not replenish. Bit by bit it turns into nitrogen and disappears.
Thus, if you find a stick that has been buried underground for a long time, you can check to find out the amount of carbon-14 in it. This tells you how long it has been since it was part of a tree that was still absorbing carbon-4 from the air.
This works for anything that used to be alive. Cooking scraps. Charcoal in old campfires. Linen. Cotton. Wool. Leather. Parchment. Papyrus. Food scraps. Mummies. Bones.. All kinds of things
Next, you look around for things that appear to have been buried at about the same time as what you just found and carbon dated. When people bury things over time, they tend to create layers of things that were buried at about the same time. By using these layers, we can see that a knife that was broken was thrown away about the same time as a fire from which they got charcoal which they were able to carbon date.
Once they have those items dated, they now have an idea of how old anything buried with a similar item was. And so on and so forth.
There are various dating methods which are checked against each other. The easiest way to date something is to literally look at the date on it. Some things just tell you when it was made. If we know that some Roman emperor only ruled from 214-227CE, and we know coins made in Rome had the current emperor on them, and we find a coin with that emperor’s name and face, we can reasonably assume that the coin is from 214-227CE. We can also check this against other artifacts found with or around it. For instance, of we found the coins in a big pile of coins which only has coins from before 250CE, then it seems pretty reasonable to assume the coins aren’t from a later date. Maybe there is also a chunk of wood or the bones of something, we can use radio-isotope dating to confirm the date. We can also figure out the relative ages of things by noting where they are buried, since things nearer the surface are younger than those further down.
Regardless, I wouldn’t get too worked up if she refuses to learn. If she wishes to remain in ignorance and look like a fool, that’s up to her.
The Romans have been continuously mentioned in literature and in academic study of them for over a thousand years. Their ruins and artifacts have been featured in paintings in art continuously as well; there are paintings from before archaeology became a discipline which feature Roman buildings in them. We have literature from figures such as Eusebius and Josephus and many others (including Roman authors) that reference the Romans. If “scientists and archaeologists just made it up” how come this thing that they made up keeps getting referenced pervasively before they even existed?
Limestone objects slowly develop a calcite shell on the outer surface in a way that is impossible to fake. Old quarried rocks that are sculpted or shaped into ancient monuments can be dated by estimating how long it would take for the surface of the rocks to weather to a certain extent. But we don’t need to do that with Roman monuments. (Where the heck would they get all the resources to cover Europe with the monuments and artifacts of a huge empire that lasted over a thousand years?) We have extensive records about these things. Only the most mysterious objects whose date-able context is missing requires direct attempts to date the item. For everything else, there is such a web of history and art and art history, with the art recording things like aesthetic trends and styles and motifs etc. that things can be dated that way. If I found an object whose aesthetics matched a particular era, that alone can roughly date the object, as long as the object can be examined and found not to be a replica. Archaeologists aren’t master forgers; forgers have to rely on authentic samples to even have anything to reference for their forgeries.
How old is your sister? This sounds too cynical to be from a young kid, but too dumb to not be from a young kid.
The academics will always try to minimize this, but there is a MASSIVE market for manufactured antiquities and texts. Every country with ancient ruins is going to have dozens of workshops creating convincing forgeries. What they don’t want you to know is that there is no foolproof way to tell the difference between real artifacts and fake ones, especially when the forgeries are using legitimately ancient materials and techniques, and those whose job it is to tell the difference are often just offering convincing guesses. Those guesses then get taken as absolute fact because they are “experts” and academics do not want to cope with the reality of uncertainty, or to allow the public to challenge their facade of authority.
Furthermore, this has been an issue for millennia, and there are many earnest academics who believe that texts and artifacts which are widely accepted as authentic are actually forgeries, and vice versa. It’s further complicated by the fact that academics sometimes participate in the forgeries themselves. So what I am trying to say is that she may have a point, in that academics have many incentives for lying about these things. But that doesn’t mean that there are not legitimate artifacts being found.
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