Abstract
Archaeologists have long sought appropriate ways to describe the duration and floruit of archaeological cultures in statistical terms. Thus far, chronological reasoning has been largely reliant on typological sequences. Using summed probability distributions, the authors here compare radiocarbon dates for a series of European Neolithic cultures with their generally accepted ‘standard’ date ranges and with the greater precision afforded by dendrochronology, where that is available. The resulting analysis gives a new and more accurate description of the duration and intensity of European Neolithic cultures.
Highlights
The construction of cultural chronologies in archaeology remains a point of major ongoing debate
The gradient of the best-fitted linear model plotted in blue is 1.038, which is to be expected as both the radiocarbon date range and the ‘standard’ date range are two different estimates of the same quantity
It may be fair to assume that the additional comparative dates provided by dendrochronology would improve the overall reliability of a culture’s chronology
Summary
The construction of cultural chronologies in archaeology remains a point of major ongoing debate. Given that awareness of available radiocarbon dates forms an important part of that up-to-date archaeological knowledge, we were surprised to find a large difference in our results when using site phases that were dated using associated radiocarbon samples, compared to the current estimate of the ‘standard’ date range for that cultural phase. In order to undertake a valid analysis of subsistence trends, or of any other archaeological phenomena for that matter, we must first investigate the congruency between the ‘standard’ date range and the contextually associated radiocarbon dates for a given culture. The resultant 14 C dataset for this study consists of 5594 radiocarbon-dated samples from 1784 archaeological site-phases (see Shennan et al 2013 for the applied definition of phase), from.
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