"Bones are Not Enough": Research in Honor of Diane Gifford-Gonzalez

Many prehistorians in Europe have used the long term as their default chronological perspective. A current ERC-funded project, 'The Times of Their Lives', is applying radiocarbon dating and a Bayesian framework for the interpretation of results to a series of case studies across the European Neolithic (sixth to third millennia cal BC) to push chronological precision to the scale of lifetimes and generations. The creation of much more precise timescales, however, still leaves the challenge of how to combine much more individual perspectives with the long term, in multi-scalar analysis. So this session seeks to explore, first, how far archaeology can go with refining its timescales, and secondly, how to combine multiple timescales. Papers will combine coverage of some key results from 'The Times of Their Lives' with comparative studies from North America.