Bayesian Approaches to the Building of Archaeological Chronologies

Bayesian inference has become an important tool for the construction of archaeological chronologies. This has been made possible by the development of Bayesian statistical methods (see, for example, Buck et al. 1991, 1996, Buck and Millard 2004, Nicholls and Jones 2001) and the development of both computing power and algorithms (Gelfand and Smith 1990, Gilks et al. 1996) that are able to put such methods to practical use. These have enabled the development of computer software to perform chronological analysis along with development of new Bayesian models that cover a wide range of situations (Blaauw et al. 2003, Bronk Ramsey 1995, 2008, 2009a,b, Buck et al. 1999, Christen 2003, Haslett and Parnell 2008, Jones and Nicholls 2002).