Approaches for Producing Precise Archaeological Chronologies

Summary

For the fortunate few, dendrochronology allows an annual window into the archaeological record. Over the past 20 years, however, Bayesian chronological modelling has brought chronologies precise to within the scale of past lifetimes and generations within the reach of all archaeologists. Explicit statistical modelling allows radiocarbon dates to be interpreted within the framework of existing knowledge provided by associated archaeological evidence, providing more precise dating and thus allowing the activities of people in the past to be understood in new ways.

Until now the ¬¬majority of published models are site-based. These models take into account the ‘relatedness’ of groups of radiocarbon dates from the same site, and can also incorporate powerful prior information about the relative order of dated samples derived from stratigraphy. But archaeologists have a wide range of other types of information about the material remnants of the past at their disposal – location, artefact typologies, the character of sediments, sequence derived from seriation, cultural associations, and many others.

This paper discusses the kinds of archaeological information that can be the basis of our chronological models, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and the ability of existing approaches to capitalise fully on their potential.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• The short and the long of it: combining timescales

Keywords

Spatial Coverage