Two Vessels, One Chronology Problem
A museum in Vienna is rehanging a case on the European Upper Paleolithic. Curator A wants to label a carved mammoth-ivory figurine (a female figure with exaggerated proportions, about 11 cm tall, found in a German cave in 2008) as 'the oldest known sculpture of the human form.' Curator B argues that a painted bison on a French cave wall, radiocarbon-dated from charcoal to roughly 17,000 years ago, is a safer anchor for the case's opening label. A third object, an antler spear-thrower carved with a leaping horse, has no direct date but was found in a stratified deposit beneath a layer yielding a date of 14,000 BP. The case must open with one object and present the others in relative order, and the wall text may not use the word 'oldest' unless it is qualified.
1. Which object should open the case, and how should the label be worded to survive scholarly objection?
Read the worked answer
The ivory figurine is the strongest opening candidate only if the label avoids a superlative claim. Its 2008 discovery and reported early date make it newsworthy, but 'oldest known' is a moving target: new finds and re-dating routinely displace such claims, and dating ivory from cave contexts carries its own uncertainties (context disturbance, possible later deposition).
A defensible label: 'Among the earliest known depictions of the human figure, made during the Upper Paleolithic; dated by associated context to roughly 35,000–40,000 years ago.' The hedge ('among the earliest known') plus a range rather than a point date is what a reviewer will accept.
The cave painting is the safer anchor for chronology because charcoal pigment can be radiocarbon-dated directly, tying the image itself to a measured age rather than to stratigraphic association. So the case can open with the figurine for its human-figure significance and use the dated bison to establish the absolute timeline, with the spear-thrower placed above the 14,000 BP layer by superposition (older than that layer, not necessarily close to it).
2. How should the spear-thrower be ordered and described given only its stratigraphic position?
Read the worked answer
Superposition gives a terminus ante quem: the object is older than the 14,000 BP layer above it. That is a one-sided constraint - it tells you the maximum age, not the actual age. The spear-thrower could be 14,500 years old or 20,000; the stratigraphy cannot distinguish.
Correct handling: place it earlier than the 14,000 BP horizon on the timeline and label it 'before 14,000 BP' or 'older than 14,000 BP,' never '14,000 years old.' The carved horse is stylistically consistent with Magdalenian portable art, which supports a late Upper Paleolithic attribution, but style alone is not a date - it corroborates the stratigraphic bracket rather than replacing it.
A student who writes 'the spear-thrower is 14,000 years old' has inverted the logic of the associated date; the exam rewards recognizing that an overlying date bounds an object from above.