ABSTRACT
The cosmogenic production and nuclear decay of radiocarbon, at the heart of so many of the chronologies, inescapably force people into 'the stochastic world of capricious electrons'. This chapter highlights the five lines of evidence: stratigraphy; chrono-typology; seriation; spatial associations; and scientific dating. In producing archaeological chronologies, Bayesian statistics provide an explicit, probabilistic method for estimating the dates when events happened in the past and for quantifying the uncertainties of these estimated dates. In the view many archaeological opinions are held on a qualitative scale. Chrono-typologies aim to provide a classification and relative sequence of artefacts, based on the progressive development of traits. Seriation is a process of ordering closed assemblages of archaeological material, most usually artefact types in graves or pits, or decorative or other traits on objects. The construction and comparison of alternative models are a fundamental part of Bayesian statistical modelling. The timescape study involved the combination of multiple site-based models across a finite region.
