Oy...

[ffutures]

NCIS New Orleans has someone talking about carbon dating silver coins to the mid 1700s.

Carbon dating silver? Really?

Comments

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Surely you date coins by looking at the date on the coin, or alternatively by the identity of the profile on the head side?

Saying that, this could easily be an actor's slip of the tongue rather than the scriptwriter's scientific illiteracy.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

In this case they were trying to establish which wreck the coins were from, so the year of sinking rather than manufacture was needed. That part more or less made sense.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

In that case, I think archeologists go through the entire cache looking for the latest coins as that establishes the earliest possible date of the wreck. That can leave a pretty wide field, though, if the last monarch on the coins had a long rule.