The Case for Radiocarbon Dating and Bayesian Analysis in Historical Archaeology (original) (raw)
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Rolling Out Revolution: Using Radiocarbon Dating in Archaeology
Radiocarbon, 2009
Sixty years ago, the advent of radiocarbon dating rewrote archaeological chronologies around the world. Forty years ago, the advent of calibration signaled the death knell of the diffusionism that had been the mainstay of archaeological thought for a century. Since then, the revolution has continued, as the extent of calibration has been extended ever further back and as the range of material that can be dated has been expanded. Now a new revolution beckons, one that could allow archaeology to engage in historical debate and usher in an entirely new kind of (pre)history. This paper focuses on more than a decade of experience in utilizing Bayesian approaches routinely for the interpretation of14C dates in English archaeology, discussing both the practicalities of implementing these methods and their potential for changing archaeological thinking.
Radiocarbon Dating in Archaeology: Interdisciplinary aspects and consequences (An overview)
AIP Conference Proceedings 1852, 060006 (2017); doi: 10.1063/1.4984870 (Theme issue: L. Trache and D. G. Ghiță (eds), Exotic Nuclei and Nuclear/Particle Astrophysics (VI). Physics with Small Accelerators. Proceedings of the Carpathian Summer School of Physics 2016 (CSSP16)) , 2017
OPEN ACCESS of full text at: http://aip.scitation.org/toc/apc/1852/1\. Abstract. This paper is an overview of recent developments in the radiocarbon dating of the most frequently analyzed archaeological materials – wood, short-lived plants, and human and animal bones – and draws attention to two sets of consequences. Firstly, while radiocarbon dating has become more accessible to archaeologists thanks to an increase in the number of laboratories, a lowering of prices, and a reduction in sample sizes, it has also grown far more dependent on fields of research, other than the traditional chemical pretreatment of samples and the physics involved in their measurement, such as wood anatomy and other fields of botany, stable isotope-based diet studies, geochemistry, micromorphology, statistics, etc., most of which are not easily accessible by the vast majority of users of radiocarbon dating (and sometimes not familiar to practicing archaeologists). Secondly, given that, on the one hand, there is still much scope for research in radiocarbon dating and, on the other, archaeological sites are a limited resource, there is need to create archives containing the detailed documentation of samples and, whenever possible, sample residues.
2014
Bayesian mathematics provides a tool for combining 14C dating results on findings from an archaeological context with independent archaeological information such as the chronological order, which may be inferred from stratigraphy. The goal is to arrive at both a more precise and a more accurate date. However, by means of simulated measurements we will show that specific assumptions about prior probabilities- implemented in calibration programs and hidden to the user- may create artifacts. This may result in dates with higher precision but lower accuracy, which are no longer in agreement with the true ages of the findings.
Radiocarbon Dating in Archaeology: Triangulation and Traceability
Data Journeys in the Sciences, 2020
When radiocarbon dating techniques were applied to archaeological material in the 1950s they were hailed as a revolution. At last archaeologists could construct absolute chronologies anchored in temporal data backed by immutable laws of physics. This would make it possible to mobilize archaeological data across regions and time-periods on a global scale, rendering obsolete the local and relative chronologies on which archaeologists had long relied. As profound as the impact of 14C dating has been, it has had a long and tortuous history now described as proceeding through three revolutions, each of which addresses distinct challenges of capturing, processing and packaging radiogenic data for use in resolving chronological puzzles with which archaeologists has long wrestled. In practice, mobilizing radiogenic data for archaeological use is a hard-won achievement; it involves multiple transformations that, at each step of the way, depend upon a diverse array of technical expertise and ...