The other night i saw a show (ancients behaving badly) about Caligula, and they dated a military camp two ways, tree rings, and a large number of coins with Caligula of them. They said the means the camp was precisely during the reign of caligula. but, the coin the showed had a counter mark on it, were coins of caligula countermarked under caligula?
Eschewing T]the Boob Tube I stopped watching PBS Nova and the Discovery Channel and the History Channel ("all Hitler, all the time") a long while back when I was able to tape them and run it back to see what they said. When it streams past you, it seems so interesting, but if you treat it like a book, the flaws are embarrassingly obvious. The coins of Caligula mark what they call the terminus ante quem: end point before what. In other words, the coins could not have come from before the time of Caligula. So, that's the earliest possible time for this camp. But it could be from any time after that. You collect ancients. I once bought 100 uncleaned Romans and buried the rejects with some Lincoln Cents in my back yard. The dates on the Lincoln Cents mark the terminus ante quem. So, the coins could have come from any time after Caligula. A soldier or more likely a civilian camp follower could have had the coins in possession for many years before burying them and not coming back for them. The coins could be countermarked at any time for any reason, but your intuition is correct: a newly struck coin of the present ruler from within a Roman army camp would likely be accepted as is, rather than being tested and counterstamped. As for the tree rings, what were they, giant sequoias? I mean, where do you find 2000 year old trees? Or maybe they had some other way to date the site and used the rings to count years within that narrow range. Or whatever. All in all, "educational" television is just not what it is advertised to be. Read books. Take a class. Chat here. Try the other trusted websites for ancients. Join a club. Subscribe to The Celator. Stay away from television.
I don't think it's possible that live trees were used, but I know that it old lumber is found, it can be roughly dated by how close the rings are to each other. If the tree grew in colder temperatures, the rings are closer together. Like I said, that really only gives you a very rough idea.
Coins can provide either a terminus post quem or a terminus ante quem (Date after which/before which). The latest dated coin usually provides the post quem. If the find includes a coin that was later demonetized, that is generally the ante quem. Of course, there's a lot to take into account. Coins, for example, have a tendency to burrow, throwing off dating estimates. Victorian threepence have been found at Roman levels! Hoard/find analysis is really not as simple as it looks.
Archeaologists have oversight over growth seasons a long way back, if they say 2000 years, they probably have. It's not by itself a totally reliable source, I believe, but a part of the puzzle, just like the coins. A friend of mine works as an archeaologist in our local museum. Her job is to interpret finds done by her colleges, identified by other colleges. It seems like a huge puzzle. archaeology. A huge, fascinating puzzle. I often regret not having taken that direction myself.
I'd like to see the coin with the c/m on it. My limited experience has not included Caligula c/m's. Claudius is common. Could you tell what type it was? Books are no longer safe sources of information. 'Vanity Press' means a fool like me can have a book printed and have anything in it I want. They only print the number required so no one invested the cash to print a full run and no one needed to check to see if the book had any chance to sell. You must use the same critical skills with boooks that you do with TV and Internet. All archaeologists are not necessarily expert in coins and it is possible that concepts like post quem are not fully understood.
I agree, they should just change the name of the network to the "Hitler Channel" and be done with it. It is unnerving how many shows they have devoted to such an unbecoming subject.
