Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Bayesian approach for chronology building has become increasingly applied over past decades to better understand archaeological activity at different spatial and chronological scales. Common techniques for big chronological understanding with Bayes range from the evaluation of multiple independent settlement chronologies to singular multisite models, whereas commonly used non-Bayesian approaches include summed probabilities or the mass calibration of measurements. Whatever method used, big chronology often aims to (1) explore diachronic cultural and demographic change, (2) develop large-scale historical narratives, and (3) address regional-specific issues of high intrinsic interest (environmental impacts, the development of cultural complexity, warfare, migration, depopulation, etc.). This session brings together papers that explore Bayesian-informed chronologies that aim to address larger-scale questions and grapple with the unique challenges related to modeling techniques and absolute dating. The goal of this session is to provide a platform for discussing and further evaluating the different chronological perspectives that modeling provides for big picture archaeological questions. An additional goal is to further consider how to best incorporate emerging and more specialized modeling approaches, such as wiggle matching, kernel density estimation modeling, and simulation experiments, into large-scale archaeological interpretation.