On the time-lag in the dating of historical settlements: Reply to Kolář and Szabó (2021)

Abstract

Settlement history is an interdisciplinary topic which connects history, archaeology, paleoecology, historical geography and other scientific disciplines. In Central Europe, one of important questions regards the dating of origin of medieval settlements. In 2020, our team published a study comparing the dating obtained from medieval written records with archaeological data (Fanta et al., 2020). Recently, Kolář and Szabó (2021) wrote a comment in which they criticised several aspects of our original study. They also suggested a new interpretation of our data based on their own reanalysis, the results of which are strikingly different from ours. We admit that many remarks raised by our colleagues are relevant and meaningful (filtering and selection of archaeological data, pottery chronology); that said, we believe that most of them have a negligible effect on the main results of our study. The reanalysis of our data by Kolář and Szabó is, however, fundamentally flawed. Their conclusion that “time lag between historical and archaeological dating can increase with time” has no backing in data; it is a mere statistical artifact produced by using inappropriate calculations and misinterpreting the results. In conclusion: A careful and correct analysis of our data indicates that the systematic upward bias in dating based on written sources is larger for earlier settlements.