One day, you're visiting an old ruin, castle of King somesuch from somewhere. On a hunch, you dig in a certain spot and lo and behold, you find a chest. You open it, and in it you find an old manuscript. "Well strike me hard and call me Magda", you might think (to you history buffs, do you do that?). This piece of writing actually seems to fill huge gap in the timeline of middle europe around the middle-ages. It'll make you famous. Well, at least it will make you what passes for famous in the history community.
All sarcasm aside; there are a few things to consider. First of all: is your document really that old? And how can you determine? Your first clue might be a date given in the writings themselves. Further, you should look at the materials used. Every age has their respective range of typically used materials. Think of how we've come to asociate papyrus scrolls with old egypt, or stone plates with the mesopoatamians.
The best solution though might be dating it using the radio-carbon method. It works something like this: Everything that grows incoporates isotopes into their tissue or structure. These isotopes can be dated by physics. So if paper is made from trees, and the youngest isotope ist from ca. 1500, your document can't be younger than that. But what if the trees kind wasn't indigenous at the place of the writing in the time of writing? You should do that for the ink, too. Forging documents by writing with new ink on old paper is not unheard of.
Even when all that checks out, you have to be wary of the content itselve. Just imagine someone finding a splatbook for AD&D a hundred years from now. Try to square that with what you know about the past, Mr. Future Archeologist.
Your find may have been a novel, or an attempt at fudging the history in the writer's favor or the favor of his leader. Once again, it may simply be wrong. News travelled a lot slower in these days, and word of mouth is prone to mistakes. It also may be just a copy of something else. All that opens a new can of worms: How far can you trust it? Does ist cross reference something, maybe other documents from that time?
That's where will continue next time. As for thewriting, I gave that article some snark on purpose. Tell me how you liked it.
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