3 Radiocarbon dating in archaeology

Archaeology students learn surprisingly little about dating, which is treated - not unlike excavation methods and recording- as something that can be taken for granted, a technical problem rather than an interesting or theoretically significant one. In fact the kind of thinking that it requires - about priors and confidence; samples and distributions; depositional relationships; the measurement, understanding, and representation of time - makes us better archaeologists.

I am not going to give you a set of rules for dating - that is, sample selection and data analysis/interpretation. Rules are for the intellectually lazy - and the best rule is to think hard about what you want to know and how to find it out.

Some key vocabulary (see also Bayliss and Marshall’s (2022) Glossary (p116-119)):

• radiocarbon age
• calibration
• priors
• sampling
• distribution
• uniform / normal / exponential / etc.
• probability density function