More paragraphs from the article, which suggest your assessment is correct.
But in reality, rumors about the professor had already been circulating for a long time. Henke admits openly: "Protschern became a synonym for fudge it."
"The man has falsified data", also says former employee Bernhard Weninger, who now heads the C 14 laboratory at the Cologne Institute for Pre- and Early History. "At the end of the eighties we examined a mass grave from the Ceramic layer", he explains. Because the tedious measuring procedure lasted too long for the boss, he simply thought up a plausible age and passed it on to the archeologists. Weninger: "We called those tricks 'mental dating'."
The Bishop of Limburg was also fobbed off in that way, says Weninger. "Around 1989 we were supposed to examine the body of a saint", he relates. He himself had begun working on determining the age of the mummy. Shortly thereafter, Protsch invited the bishop to the institute and brashly announced the results. "I wasn't any way near finished with the measuring yet."
"Spiegel-Online"....August 16, 2004....Mattias Schulz
Translated by longjack
Sounds like we have a fraud.