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I totally agree with your assessment there, Mick. The way they produce those programs in the US, all they're looking for is just plain sensationalism with little regard to the actual work being done.
I shake my head in disbelief when I hear about "experts" proclaiming a date based on "pottery analysis". I often wonder how they can get away with it in the peer reviewed journals. If I was the editor or reviewer for a journal, I wouldn't allow it. Quite frankly I wouldn't even teach it, except as an aside, maybe. It's not good science.
As a geologist, if I were to identify a trilobite that was buried in the same sediments as a T-rex femur, and then said the trilobite was the same age as the T-rex femur, I'd be laughed at!!!. If I then insisted that it was true and that you could use it to date any T-rex femur found (or trilobite for that matter), I'd never get a paper published again. At least not until I woke up to myself and noticed the error and figured out why the trilobite got where it was.
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