Assumptions baked into the VMS carbon dating

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It's much less separate objects than you'd think. You can get several bifolios out of the same skin.

But it seems unlikely that the author would have acquired uncut whole skins. 

It brings us back to the discussion of how vellum was marketed.  A survey of manuscript page sizes by Rene showed that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. close to sqrt(2) like the ISO A paper sizes, suggesting that it was some sort of a standard of commerce.  That aspect ratio has the property that if a sheet is cut or folded in half, each half is similar to the original, just rotated 90 degrees.

Opinion differed on whether the sizes were clustered too.  I thought I saw clustering around certain values spaced by a factor of sqrt(sqrt(2)), like the modern A and B paper size series interleaved; but others just saw a continuum of sizes. 

Anyway,  the Author probably got sheets that were already cut into rectangular shapes.   Maybe most were already of the right size, or maybe he had to trim some and cut others in half.  

But some of the sheets were clearly "off-cuts" with an irregular edge, where the piece ran into the edge of the whole skin. 

And as far as I'm aware, nothing in the VM shows that some skins are of a different supply. They are all of similar size and quality.

The fold-outs have very different sizes.  They in particular seem to have been made by cutting large off-cut pieces to the height of the book, or (in the Rosettes case) twice that height. 

And the bifolio f115+f105 is a whole centimeter shorter (vertically) than the others.

And the quality seems to vary a lot.  Weren't there reports from Beinecke visitors that the folios have variable thickness and stiffness?

All the best, --stolfi