I know what you mean, Steven. What really makes me laugh is their technique called "pottery analysis". Archaeologists think they can accurately date a site just by looking at the pottery they find in it (if they find any at all). Quite frankly, I think it's a load of crock(ery)
Coming from a geologists point of view, I can't see how you could rely on pieces of (mostly) fired materials to try and confirm the age of anything. Apart from the fact that you have movement through the soil profile, over time, of any solid materials in it, how in the dickens do they even know how that pottery got there in the first place??. Then you have the problem of the firing process....it has a nasty habit of resetting the age of any radiometric dating materials within the pottery. Groundwater leaching can also have the same effect, contamination by biogenic materials....the list of problems could go on for pages.
The whole idea of pottery analysis is to look at what they find, and tell from the style of the finds what time period it came from. That'd be like finding a piece of 18th century Wedgewood crockery near the ruins of a modern skyscraper, in 1000 years time, and attributing the ruins of the skyscraper to the people who made the crockery.
It's not science.
However, that doesn't detract from Time Team
