Moments in Time: Re-creating History with the Bayesian Approach

This session brings together papers that discuss how archaeologists can use the Bayesian approach to create histories approximating lived experiences on multiple scales. Over the past five years there have been many studies that used Bayesian modeling to revise aspects of ancient European history. These projects have generally produced chronologies of higher accuracy, transparency, and reproducibility than those created from informal interpretation. This work has been referred to as the third radiocarbon revolution, partially because it has required European archaeologists to completely rethink long-standing culture-historic chronologies and devise new narratives for interpreting the past. A theme of the session is how chronological re-examinations with Bayesian modeling interface with archaeological theory. In many cases the Bayesian approach has involved the quantification of previously unrealized temporal phenomena and this session will address how our theoretical approaches in archaeology might change due to powerful temporal analyses. Papers in this session will: 1) review how Bayesian chronological modeling has begun to challenge understandings of important topics, 2) discuss specifically how Bayesian modeling has revised historical narratives, and/or 3) problematize long-standing chronologies and discuss plans for their revision.