Assumptions baked into the VMS carbon dating

[asteckley]

I would still appreciate if you are willing to explain some things that I have not grasped, because I can't come to the right conclusion if I don't know what exactly i'm not understanding. I would like to know why the fact that other books can have different sources of parchment does not hold the weight I think it does, for example.

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.  

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.)