Talk Description

If anything looks like an ‘infallible foundation’ for archaeological reasoning it’s radiocarbon dating. Hailed as a revolution that got under way in the 1950s, it was expected to establish an absolute chronology that would render obsolete the local and relative chronologies on which archaeologists had long relied. Transformative though it has been, the process of bringing these tools of physical dating to bear on archaeological problems has been a long, tortuous process, now described as proceeding through three radiocarbon revolutions. The first revolution, Libby’s initial introduction of radiocarbon dating to archaeology, quickly gave rise to a decades-long process of calibration by which ¹⁴C chronologies were corrected and refined, often against the very lines of evidence they were meant to displace. Increasingly, however, the advocates of a third, “pragmatic Bayesian” revolution argue that, no matter how much it is refined, radiocarbon dating cannot on its own resolve the chronological problems that archaeologists address. To construct chronological data that can travel, archaeologists must mobilize many different lines of evidence; they rely on a genre of “robustness reasoning.” I identify conditions for success in this that are made explicit in debate about chronologies based on legacy data.