Stop trusting carbon dating on organic samples without checking the calibration curve

I used to just accept whatever date the lab gave me for pottery fragments at the Johnson Creek dig in Oregon. Last year I got a reading of 4,200 years on a charcoal sample, but when I checked the calibration curve it shifted to 4,450 years. That's a huge difference for site comparisons. Now I always ask for the raw delta 13C data and run it through OxCal myself before submitting any report. It takes an extra hour but it saved me from publishing wrong conclusions about seasonal occupation. Has anyone else caught a lab error this way or do you just trust the printed results?

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