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Authors: Steven Rinella
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really put this sentiment into the proper words. Now I felt as though my whole enterprise with the buffalo skull was being mocked. I pictured myself as an oddball variant of those folks who spend their time and money trying to prove that they are descended from European royalty.
But the story with the skull had a satisfactory ending after all. When my radiocarbon results arrived in the mail, I discovered that my buffalo skull’s official age was, in the jargon of radiocarbon dating, 150 +/– 40 BP. Calibrated to calendar years, that meant the buffalo was no older than A.D. 1660. Because the bone did not contain radioactive bomb carbon from atmospheric testing of nuclear warheads, it was no younger than A.D. 1960.
The first thing I said was, “A three-hundred-year span of time was the best that these people could do for $675?” I was tempted to call the Better Business Bureau, but first I dialed up Darden Hood, of Beta Analytic, to see what he had to say for himself. He politely explained a few things to me, such as the “heliomagnetic modulation of the galactic cosmos,” “geomagnetic variations,” and the “intercepts between the average radiocarbon age and the calibrated curve timescale.” That information helped him to explain, in a roundabout way, why organic materials from the past few hundred years are less reliably datable than materials from the past few thousand years.
I sank into a mild carbon-dating depression. Then one day I was reading something by an archaeologist with the National Park Service named Kenneth P. Cannon. He was discussing a buffalo skull with the exact same radiocarbon date as mine, 150 +/– BP, which was analyzed by Beta Analytic of Miami, Florida. Cannon writes, “Statistically, this bison likely died in the early to mid-18th century.”
I called Kenneth Cannon at his office in Lincoln, Nebraska, and told him about my little problem. * He knows Darden, has worked with him for years. He explained that Darden’s job is to accurately calculate radiocarbon dates, “not interpret results.” “There’s always going to be a level of variability in calculation and interpretation,” explained Ken. But he did help shed some light on my results. He explained that there’s a 95 percent chance that my buffalo died between A.D. 1720 and A.D. 1880, and a 66 percent chance that it died within a few decades of A.D. 1750. For the sake of patriotic nostalgia, it’s fun to think that my American buffalo might have died in 1776. And because the animal was found at such a high elevation, nine thousand feet, it’s apparent that he died in the snow-free season of summertime. While I’m not going so far as to suggest that he died on July 4, 1776, you can’t say for sure that he didn’t. Now, when people come over to my house, I’ll usually point at the skull and say, “See that? That buffalo might have been alive when they signed the Declaration of Independence.” I can never decide if there is irony in that statement, or nostalgia, or what, so I usually just let the statement stand on its own. People fill the silence by walking over and picking it up.
5
T HINK OF THE SHAPE of the letter D. The curved arc of the letter’s right side is the fifty-mile stretch of the Copper River that I’m going to float in search of buffalo. The vertical line at the letter’s left side is the forty-mile stretch of highway south of Copper Center, a small village that lies just south of Glennallen. Where the two lines meet, at the top and bottom of the D, are two places where my partners and I can get a truck close enough to the river to load and unload gear into a raft. The lower part is near the town of Tonsina, where there’s a little road off the highway that salmon fishermen use to access their fish traps. I’ve got a buddy’s truck parked down there with the keys hidden under the front-left tire. We’ll use that truck at the
But the story with the skull had a satisfactory ending after all. When my radiocarbon results arrived in the mail, I discovered that my buffalo skull’s official age was, in the jargon of radiocarbon dating, 150 +/– 40 BP. Calibrated to calendar years, that meant the buffalo was no older than A.D. 1660. Because the bone did not contain radioactive bomb carbon from atmospheric testing of nuclear warheads, it was no younger than A.D. 1960.
The first thing I said was, “A three-hundred-year span of time was the best that these people could do for $675?” I was tempted to call the Better Business Bureau, but first I dialed up Darden Hood, of Beta Analytic, to see what he had to say for himself. He politely explained a few things to me, such as the “heliomagnetic modulation of the galactic cosmos,” “geomagnetic variations,” and the “intercepts between the average radiocarbon age and the calibrated curve timescale.” That information helped him to explain, in a roundabout way, why organic materials from the past few hundred years are less reliably datable than materials from the past few thousand years.
I sank into a mild carbon-dating depression. Then one day I was reading something by an archaeologist with the National Park Service named Kenneth P. Cannon. He was discussing a buffalo skull with the exact same radiocarbon date as mine, 150 +/– BP, which was analyzed by Beta Analytic of Miami, Florida. Cannon writes, “Statistically, this bison likely died in the early to mid-18th century.”
I called Kenneth Cannon at his office in Lincoln, Nebraska, and told him about my little problem. * He knows Darden, has worked with him for years. He explained that Darden’s job is to accurately calculate radiocarbon dates, “not interpret results.” “There’s always going to be a level of variability in calculation and interpretation,” explained Ken. But he did help shed some light on my results. He explained that there’s a 95 percent chance that my buffalo died between A.D. 1720 and A.D. 1880, and a 66 percent chance that it died within a few decades of A.D. 1750. For the sake of patriotic nostalgia, it’s fun to think that my American buffalo might have died in 1776. And because the animal was found at such a high elevation, nine thousand feet, it’s apparent that he died in the snow-free season of summertime. While I’m not going so far as to suggest that he died on July 4, 1776, you can’t say for sure that he didn’t. Now, when people come over to my house, I’ll usually point at the skull and say, “See that? That buffalo might have been alive when they signed the Declaration of Independence.” I can never decide if there is irony in that statement, or nostalgia, or what, so I usually just let the statement stand on its own. People fill the silence by walking over and picking it up.
5
T HINK OF THE SHAPE of the letter D. The curved arc of the letter’s right side is the fifty-mile stretch of the Copper River that I’m going to float in search of buffalo. The vertical line at the letter’s left side is the forty-mile stretch of highway south of Copper Center, a small village that lies just south of Glennallen. Where the two lines meet, at the top and bottom of the D, are two places where my partners and I can get a truck close enough to the river to load and unload gear into a raft. The lower part is near the town of Tonsina, where there’s a little road off the highway that salmon fishermen use to access their fish traps. I’ve got a buddy’s truck parked down there with the keys hidden under the front-left tire. We’ll use that truck at the
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