Translation of review by Pascual Tumburri Bariain

http://www.elsemanaldigital.com/articulos.asp?idarticulo=94257

March 18 2009

Age is no longer a secret known only to those who pay for it

We follow without resolving a question that was already raised by  the egyptians: How long has the world existed? How can we measure the age of things in a permanently trustworthy way?

All historians and their allies have faced the same challenge since the times of Herodotus: any explanation of an event hangs in emptiness unless we are able to locate it in space and time. History is told, but it is specifically provided through the two eyes of history: geography and chronology. I recall perfectly that a geographer, Pedro Plans, explaining to us this first truth of history, without which the rest makes no sense. Also in the first courses for prehistorians and archaeologists they dazzle the students  with an insatiable eagerness for dating, and chronology returns with all its complications when epigraphers, paleographers and diplomatists need to determine dates for the events they know or reconstruct. 

 In recent decades western historians have gone beyond relative dating and have ventured to give absolute dates to past phenomena: it was difficult but always possible to deduce what happened before and what happened later, but the absolute chronology-- that which refers to a time-scale which we know and use today--  has always been the real challenge. For millennia our predecessors have had to be satisfied with vague references to "antiquity", whereas since the twentieth century we have had at least the rudimentary techniques necessary to give absolute and absolutely verifiable dates.

 Hedman dedicates this book to a matter that is otherwise technical and may even be regarded as dry, but it has the virtue of making it provoke the interest of the reader: After all, as  humans, we are interested in having a better and more precise knowledge of the past, and the chronology is not alien to us... unless we regard it as more technical and less human(?). Dating is an essentially human activity, and what  in past generations might be considered a literary fiction like a "time machine" in the twentieth century has become possible. Radiocarbon and Potassium-Argon dating are far from perfect, but they go far beyond the dates which were available before. For many objects from the past, we not only know wether they are earlier or later than others, but we can also specify approximately their age. Hedman always adds to this technical marvel an improvement of a comprehensible description for a cultured but not necessarily expert reader. It is, perhaps, the principle merit of this book
 
 This is not a manual of chronology, but a synthesis of developments in chronologival matters that only began to be considered when they retired Santos Garcia Larragueta. Along with the radioisotope methods of absolute dating, Hedman describes the amazing accuracy of the  calendars of the Maya and the Egyptians and analyzes the knowledge that the ancients had of astronomical events, as well as how biological phenomena may be able to provide an absolute dating that the subject clearly needs. In the writings of hedman chronology stops being an auxillary science, or a set of techniques ancillary to history, and becomes a subject of knowledge and an entity unto itself; the author describes the importance of this knowledge and explains if in a comprehensible way for all cultured readers. 
 
 Today, we are now able to tell the age of Aphrodite, Helen and Isis, in our own calendar with more precision than the date of their births according to folklore. Unlike the ancients we can reduce all the partial calendars to a universal calendar, and that accomplishment in our time will be a worthy thing to be remembered in the future. As these means of dating still have been used clumsily in famous cases like that of the Shroud of Turin, it is recommended that one read Hedman before commenting on such thorny matters.