6th June 2011, 07:38 PM
you've pretty much got it in a nutshell. it's not a dating technique in the sense of a new scientific procedure, its a statistical technique for comparing lots of dates of various kinds. So, instead of just being able to say 'half the pot is 4th to 6th century and half is 6th to 9th, so the depositional event took place in the 6th', you can compare date ranges with stratigraphic associations (e.g. 'the archaeomagnetically dated burning event is older than the depositional event, but took place at the same as or before the erosion, from which colluviation buried the radiocarbon-dated organic remains'). simple really, like all statistics... just lots and lots of simple. It's also not new; I was using it 6 or 8 years ago, albeit very poorly, and it goes back a long way further.
I like it, personally, if only because it can put stratigraphy back at the forefront of interpretation, where it should be. It's also useable for small problems as well as big. There's a university that has an online tool to make it easy; can't remember which one though..Leicester maybe?
I like it, personally, if only because it can put stratigraphy back at the forefront of interpretation, where it should be. It's also useable for small problems as well as big. There's a university that has an online tool to make it easy; can't remember which one though..Leicester maybe?
Madweasels Wrote:"They matched notoriously imprecise carbon-14 dates from organic remains – which can have a margin of error of centuries – with all the other evidence from archaeological finds, narrowing the dates for sites from centuries to decades."
Can anyone enlighten me as to what this new dating technique actually is? It looks to me as if loads of data has been studied intensely and the chronologies of these CWs refined - thanks to some super-wizard computer programme. Research, more like, but not a new dating technique.