ABSTRACT
All archaeologists are required to know something about the sequence of artefacts, cultures and sites which are their stock in trade, but most of them, most of the time, take the framework for the chronology of a given period or civilization for granted, on the grounds that it has been carefully built up over many years, and the foundations cannot constantly be questioned. But the ways in which that framework has been constructed may be many and various, not all of equal reliability. In this chapter the main sources for the construction of archaeological chronologies are presented, and some examples of reliable—and unreliable—chronologies discussed. To those brought up in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the genealogical lists in the early books of the Old Testament serve as a vivid reminder of how time-depth could be expressed in the ancient world. This indeed was the basis for the calculation that has made James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh between 1625 and 1656, famous to generations of archaeologists: that the Creation occurred in the year 4004 BC. The details of his calculation are unimportant, and the result itself merely of historical interest, but the method is significant. By assuming that a generation was of X years, and that there had been Y generations prior to defined historical events as recorded in the Bible, the years elapsed were X times Y, an absolute number of years that can be related to historical and thence to modern times.
