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.
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