Passage:
For nearly a century, Mesoamerican scholars grappled with the 'correlation problem'—the challenge of aligning the Classical Maya Long Count calendar with the Gregorian calendar. The Long Count recorded dates as a linear tally of days elapsed since a mythical starting point in 3114 BCE. Because the system fell out of widespread use centuries before Spanish chroniclers recorded contemporaneous indigenous and European dates in the sixteenth century, establishing an exact mathematical constant to bridge the two chronological systems was critical. Two primary correlation constants emerged as leading contenders: the Goodman-Martínez-Thompson (GMT) correlation, which posits a correlation constant of 584,283 days, and the Spinden correlation, which utilizes a constant of 489,384 days.
The historical stakes of this debate were immense; adopting the Spinden correlation would place the flourishing of classic Maya monumental architecture and hieroglyphic inscriptions roughly 260 years earlier than the GMT model. In the mid-twentieth century, early carbon-14 dating techniques produced ambiguous results due to broad standard error margins and the 'old wood' effect, wherein inner rings of long-lived trees yielded radiocarbon ages significantly older than the date the tree was felled and carved.
The impasse was decisively resolved in 2013 by a research team led by Douglas Kennett. Kennett and his colleagues applied high-precision accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating to annular tree rings extracted from four carved structural lintels made of sapodilla wood (Manilkara zapota) from the temples of Tikal in Guatemala. Crucially, the lintels bore carved hieroglyphic inscriptions recording specific historical Long Count dates associated with ruler Jasaw Chan K'awiil I. By utilizing high-resolution wiggle-matching—a statistical technique that matches sequences of radiocarbon dates from consecutive tree rings against the known atmospheric calibration curve—the researchers circumvented the old wood effect. Their analysis demonstrated that the outermost growth ring immediately preceding the bark of Lintel 3 from Temple I was formed between 658 and 696 CE. When cross-referenced with the carved Long Count dedication date on the lintel (9.13.3.7.18), the AMS wiggle-matched dates matched the GMT correlation calendar to within a few years, while definitively excluding the Spinden correlation by more than two centuries.
Statement: Based on the passage, the researchers led by Kennett overcame the 'old wood' effect by using a statistical method that matches sequences of radiocarbon measurements from consecutive growth rings against the atmospheric calibration curve.
Answer: Answer