Assumptions baked into the VMS carbon dating

[asteckley]

Looking over your responses in this thread -- not only to my comments, but to others as well-- it really seems like you are not grasping certain aspect about the approach the Arizona team took, about how measurement errors affect data, about how probabilities work, and how multiple features of the manuscript point to a different prior belief than you are wanting to accept. The reasoning behind the adoption of the single-object assumption is just one of the things you seem to be missing. Granted, it really doesn't help that Hodgins explanations were imprecise, if not overtly misleading.

But on the other hand, several people in this thread (including Stolfi, oshfdk and myself) have independently made some similar points to each other regarding how the probabilities should combine in this context, and why the double mode distribution is less of a concern than you seem to be thinking. And yet your responses suggest you still have a basic misunderstanding of the concepts. If not for that repeated failure, I would be inclined to try to find better ways to explain things. But it doesn't look like it would be a good use of time -- it would be a better use of time for you to just go back and try to better understand what has already been said.
More specifically: 

• why it is more likely, even though it's not certain, that the parchment came from a common source and why that likelihood is very relevant
  
• why the calibration curve is more to blame for some of what you are concerned about than the data (for example, if the curve happened to be shifted by a few years, that whole issue goes away)
  
• why the fact that some books can indeed be found using different sources of parchment, doesn't hold the weight you are giving it