(28-08-2026, 08:09 PM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, I'm not trying t put you off, and if I find some time to try to explain my points better than I did, I will. But I've just don't have the bandwidth right now.
No I understand, and I appreciate it.
(28-08-2026, 08:09 PM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But on your last point: there are indeed other books with different sources of parchment-- sure --but that is not the most common case one will find. I had mentioned, I think, about four features of this book that would suggest it was probably created in a single production effort (i.e. using the same stock of parchment). That suggestion follows from those observed features because the majority of books (I am sure, by far) that have those particular features also turn out to be the result of a single book production effort. So the fact that you can find some instances of books with disparate paper sources doesn't mean that it isn't still far more likely than not that when you find those features, you are looking at a book whose pages all had a common source. (In other words, your observation of selected exceptions holds little weight.) And -- given the amount of overlap of C14 dating results from four individual samples, which itself suggests there is a physical relationship between them and that the differences are probably due to subsumed measurement errors alone-- it becomes reasonable to treat the samples as a "single source"; that choice of treatment dictates a particular calculation process to reduce measurement errors.
(By the way, you pointed out that being bound together was not a good indicator of a common source, especially since it is believed that the manuscript might have been bound together only after it had been long completed as separate projects. That might be true, but it would also be a demonstration that someone in the past once noticed the rest of the features and also drew the same conclusion -- that the pages were most likely all part of a single book and so they ought to be bound together. And so they bound them.)
So, I have had a different feeling about how common this is, I think predominantly through adding sources to the spreadsheets. It is more common than not that everything has one date, yes, and it is more common that these manuscripts appear to be a single production process.
However, I have lost count of just how many times i've had to dive into the descriptions and official reports to work out which sections date to when. That situation is less common, yes, but it happens quite frequently and can be rather frustrating. Now, I don't have a number to give you as to how many of those manuscripts sourced
different parchment for each differently dated section, but it is definitely more than a few (obviously, the ones i'm thinking of were plain and obvious - the non-obvious ones will likely not have been carbon dated). And these are sometimes dating differences of up to 100 years or more, not always 5 or 10 years or something. I assume they got bound together due to their shared topic in most cases.
So, is it more likely that it was a single production? Yes perhaps, I would say so. But the fact that finding the alternative is common enough that it is not even really notable anymore would suggest that the odds are more even than is being assumed. Of course, "More likely than not" encompasses many sets of varying odds, everywhere from 99%-1% all the way to 51%-49%. So how reasonable an assumption this is is effectively a value judgment based on that % split. 99%-1% is probably a very good bet, while 70%-30% would arguably be too risky to rely on completely.
(It is worth saying that in my experience, such examples of various different dated sections have been far more common in southern germany than elsewhere, but I don't have hard data to back that up right now.)
Now, it is also worth mentioning that part of this is not helped by the choices of samples. IF the VMS was such a case with differently dated topical sections - however likely or unlikely that is - the most logical differences in date would be between the sections. If older and newer parchment were seperately added, it would be less likely to find that in the middle of a section. So if the 4 samples had included 1 sample from 4 sections and still overlapped, I would personally hold that with higher weight than the current results.
Unfortunately, multiple large different sections were not tested. If they were to be, its quite possible they would overlap much the same, but it is also entirely possible that it would differ. (
reasonably possible, not with the same chance as being made 60,000 years ago or made by aliens as put to me earlier in this thread).
