Slow night so I tracked down some of the Wiki links. This one pretty much settles it, Wood was wrong:
Is Bryant Wood's chronology of Jericho valid?
Some excerpts:
'In the March/April 1990 issue of
Biblical Archaeology Review conservative biblical archaeologist Dr. Bryant G. Wood proposed that Garstang was right all along. He proposed that the termination of City IV Jericho be redated from
ca. 1550 B.C. to
ca. 1400 B.C. He argued that a reanalyis of pottery shards excavated from City IV, stratigraphic considerations, scarab evidence, and a single radiocarbon date all converged "to demonstrate that City IV was destroyed in about 1400 B.C.E., not 1550 B.C.E. as Kenyon maintained." '
Oh oh, looks pretty good for Wood.
But wait the professionals did not take Wood very seriously:
"Wood has attempted to redate the destruction of Jericho City IV from the end of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 1550 B.C.) to the end of the Late Bronze I (c. 1400 B.C.). He has put forward four lines of argument to support his conclusion. Not a single one of these arguments can stand up to scrutiny. On the contrary, there is strong evidence to confirm Kathleen Kenyon's dating of City IV to the Middle Bronze Age. Wood's attempt to equate the destruction of City IV with the Israelite conquest of Jericho must therefore be rejected."
Wood was not happy:
"Bienkowski's attempt to explain away the evidence for lowering the date of the destruction of Jericho is misguided and void of substance. Assertions made without data to back them up are unconvincing. His discussion is superficial, at best, lacking both depth and precision."
The plot thickens:
"
Settling the Dispute
It is clear that the question is one of chronology. When was City IV Jericho destroyed? The scholarly consensus says
ca. 1550 B.C., Wood says
ca. 1400 B.C. What source can we turn to to settle this dispute?
In fact, radiocarbon is such a source. In the early 1990's, when Wood first published his claims, there was only one radiocarbon measurement available for City IV. It was from a piece of charcoal dated by the British Museum to 1410 plus or minus 40 years B.C. Unfortunately, this date was later retracted by the British Museum, along with dates of several hundred other samples. The British Museum found that their radiocarbon measurement apparatus had gone out of calibration for a period of time, and thus had yielded incorrect dates during that period. The corrected date for the charcoal sample from City IV turned out to be consistent with Kenyon's
ca. 1550 B.C. date for the City IV destruction.
The corrected date no longer supported Wood's proposal, but it was insufficient to falsify the proposal. Radiocarbon dates on charcoal give the date the wood grew, not the date it was burned. To be consistent with Bryant Wood's proposal, the wood which burned to produce the charcoal sample would need to have been cut from a living tree 150 years prior to the destruction. Of course, this is not impossible."
So Wood lost his one radiocarbon date. How will this be resolved?
"
As mentioned earlier, no other radiocarbon dates from samples from City IV Jericho were available in the early 1990's. In 1995, however, results were published by Hendrik J. Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht from high-precision radiocarbon measurements made on eighteen samples from Jericho. Six of these samples were charred cereal grains from the City IV destruction. Bruins and van der Plicht did not set out to disprove Wood's thesis. Their stated purpose was to contribute "toward the establishment of an independent radiocarbon chronology of Near Eastern archaeology."
The chart below is the same as the chart shown earlier. Heavy black bars have been added showing the range of dates radiocarbon gave from the six charred grain samples from City IV Jericho.
Bruins and van der Plicht recognized the results of their work held a serious implication for Wood's theory. They devoted only one sentence to this implication:
Further, the fortified Bronze Age city at Tell es-Sultan [Jericho] was not destroyed by
ca.1400 BC, as Wood (1990) suggested.As is evident from the chart, the radiocarbon measurements strongly support the chronology advanced by Kenyon long before the radiocarbon measurements were made. This radiocarbon evidence falsifies Wood's theory. City IV was destroyed
ca. 1550 B.C., not
ca. 1400 B.C. City IV Jericho was not destroyed by Joshua."
So Wood was wrong after all. Radiocarbon dating, which he relied on, showed that he was wrong in his dating of the destruction of the city.
Do you have anything else?
LOL.. OK.. I just don't think RA has anything to do with noodles!