Alex Bayliss

Historic England

Since 1993 Historic England (and its predecessor English Heritage) has commissioned 9074 radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) measurements on archaeological samples. Over 80% of these have been interpreted within formal Bayesian statistical models. The multiple strands of reinforcing evidence incorporated in these models provide precise chronologies that make strin...

Radiocarbon (C) ages cannot provide absolutely dated chronologies for archaeological or paleoenvironmental studies directly but must be converted to calendar age equivalents using a calibration curve compensating for fluctuations in atmospheric C concentration. Although calibration curves are constructed from independently dated archives, they inva...

https://rdcu.be/b3s6J Pottery is one of the most commonly recovered artefacts from archaeological sites. Despite more than a century of relative dating based on typology and seriation1, accurate dating of pottery using the radiocarbon dating method has proven extremely challenging owing to the limited survival of organic temper and unreliability o...

Part of the Historic England series of Advice and Guidance on using scientific techniques for understanding the Historic Environment, this document provides guidelines for good practice in the use of radiocarbon dating and chronological modelling in archaeology. It gives practical advice on the application of these methods within archaeological pr...

The Sun drives Earth’s energy systems, influencing weather, ocean currents, and agricultural productivity. Understanding solar variability is critical, but direct observations are limited to 400 years of sunspot records. To extend this timeline, cosmic ray-produced radionuclides like ¹⁴C in tree-rings provide invaluable insights. However, few recor...

A prehistoic tell settlement in the Romanian Banat UIVAR I Uivar "Gomilă" is a Neolithic and Early Eneolithic tell site in the alluvial plain of the Romanian Banat. Archaeological field research has been carried out by a joint Romanian-German team between 1998 and 2009. The present volume is the first part of the final publication and presents the...

A prehistoic tell settlement in the Romanian Banat UIVAR I Uivar "Gomilă" is a Neolithic and Early Eneolithic tell site in the alluvial plain of the Romanian Banat. Archaeological field research has been carried out by a joint Romanian-German team between 1998 and 2009. The present volume is the first part of the final publication and presents the...

This study suggests that there may be considerable difficulties in providing accurate calendar age estimates in the Roman period in Europe, between ca. AD 60 and ca. AD 230, using the radiocarbon calibration datasets that are currently available. Incorporating the potential for systematic offsets between the measured data and the calibration curve...

Over the last decade, the field of radiocarbon analysis has been revolutionized by the discovery of single-year anomalies, because they can be used as markers of space weather events and as time anchors for exact dating. Brehm et al. (2021) recently analyzed two new anomalies, in the years 1052 CE and 1279 CE. These candidates show consecutive year...

Radiocarbon (14C) is essential for creating chronologies to study the timings and drivers of pivotal events in human history and the Earth system over the past 55,000 years. It is also a fundamental proxy for investigating solar processes, including the potential of the Sun for extreme activity. Until now, fluctuations in past atmospheric 14C level...

Radiocarbon dating and chronological modelling of samples from the Dorchester palisaded enclosure, recovered from excavations at Greyhound Yard and Church Street, Dorchester, Dorset were undertaken in support of a PhD funded by the AHRC through the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership at Cardiff University undertaken by Susan Greaney...

Pottery vessels played a central role in the processing, storage and transport of animal and plant products by prehistoric and historic peoples with their chemical residues surviving for thousands of years. Accurate radiocarbon dating of archaeological pottery vessels by isolating reliable sources of carbon relating to the use of pots has long been...

In 1996, a rescue excavation was carried out by Tees Archaeology after the discovery of human bones during building work. The excavated Early Bronze Age cemetery is unusual for the range of mortuary treatment in evidence and for the quantity and variety of the grave goods in one particular grave, Burial 5. Here the body of a young to middle-aged wo...

Radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronology modeling have provided precise dating for the rondel at Nowe Objezierze (northwestern Poland). This monument, located in the farthest reaches of the “Danubian World,” sheds new light on rondels and the way they functioned. A total of 44 radiocarbon dates are now available for the site, and modeling of thes...

The IntCal family of radiocarbon ( ¹⁴ C) calibration curves is based on research spanning more than three decades. The IntCal group have collated the ¹⁴ C and calendar age data (mostly derived from primary publications with other types of data and meta-data) and, since 2010, made them available for other sorts of analysis through an open-access dat...

Direct, accurate, and precise dating of archaeological pottery vessels is now achievable using a recently developed approach based on the radiocarbon dating of purified molecular components of food residues preserved in the walls of pottery vessels. The method targets fatty acids from animal fat residues, making it uniquely suited for directly dati...

A new chronological study of the LBK in the central Polish lowlands shows that it emerged later, lasted for a shorter period, and ended sooner than has been supposed up till now. LBK communities emerged, probably in the middle of the 53 rd century cal BC, to form an enclave in the central Polish lowlands, probably as a result of colonisation from l...

A handful of new radiocarbon dates from three Balaton-Lasinja culture graves at the site of Veszprém-Jutasi út in western Hungary form the starting point for formal models for late Lengyel and post-Lengyel chronology in that region. The graves date to the later fifth millennium cal BC. They provide the opportunity to put the earlier Copper Age Bala...

The Sun sporadically produces eruptive events leading to intense fluxes of solar energetic particles (SEPs) that dramatically disrupt the near-Earth radiation environment. Such events have been directly studied for the last decades but little is known about the occurrence and magnitude of rare, extreme SEP events. Presently, a few events that produ...

Neolithic occupation of the Orkney Islands, in the north of Scotland, probably began in the mid fourth millennium cal BC, culminating in a range of settlements, including stone-built houses, varied stone-built tombs and two noteworthy stone circles. The environmental and landscape context of the spectacular archaeology, however, remains poorly unde...

Over the last three decades, organic residue analysis has been shown to be especially useful in ancient diet reconstruction; however, it is only recently that the direct radiocarbon dating of lipid residues has become a reliable method for dating pottery vessels and food procurement activities. Here, we applied lipid residue analysis to 29 late Bro...

Land divisions are ubiquitous features of the British countryside. Field boundaries, enclosures, pit alignments, and other forms of land division have been used to shape and delineate the landscape over thousands of years. While these divisions are critical for understanding economies and subsistence, the organization of tenure and property, social...

The Sun sporadically produces eruptive events leading to intense fluxes of solar energetic particles (SEPs) that dramatically disrupt the near-Earth radiation environment. Such events are directly studied for the last decades but little is known about the occurrence and magnitude of rare, extreme SEP events. Presently, a few events that produced me...

The Copper Age cemetery in Varna, Bulgaria, is famous for the earliest known, massive deposition of exquisite golden artefacts. Radiocarbon dating of the Varna i cemetery, excavated in the period 1972–91, places it in the mid-fifth millennium bc and suggests a duration of c 225 years from c 4550 to c 4325 cal bc . Construction work in the adjacent...

The social organization of the first fully sedentary societies that emerged during the Neolithic period in Southwest Asia remains enigmatic,1 mainly because material culture studies provide limited insight into this issue. However, because Neolithic Anatolian communities often buried their dead beneath domestic buildings,2 household composition and...

The Dating the Earliest Neolithic Ceramics of Wessex project was part of a training programme in the Bayesian chronological modelling of radiocarbon dates funded by Historic England. Its original scope was to target ceramic assemblages for dating in four areas: the Middle Thames, the Avebury area, the Stonehenge area of Salisbury Plain, and an area...

The Sun provides the principal energy input into the Earth system and solar variability represents a significant external climate forcing. Although observations of solar activity (sunspots) cover only the last about 400 years, radionuclides produced by cosmic rays and stored in tree rings or ice cores serve as proxies for solar activity extending b...

Excavations at Çatalhöyük represent one of the most extensive, detailed and long-standing work at any Neolithic settlement in the world. It was James Mellaart who first investigated the site between 1961 and 1965, then the excavations were continued by Ian Hodder from 1993 to 2017. Both Mellaart and Hodder were ahead of their respective times in th...

This paper, presents formally modelled date estimates for the sequence of Lengyel funerary pottery in western Hungary, eastern Austria and south-west Slovakia. It is an extension of the dating and modelling already carried out by the project, The Times of Their Lives (ToTL), on the major Lengyel aggregation, including burials, at Alsónyék-Bátaszék...

We undertook a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis of Northern Hemisphere tree-ring datasets included in IntCal20 in order to evaluate their strategic fit with the demands of archaeological users. Case studies on wiggle-matching single tree rings from timbers in historic buildings and Bayesian modeling of series of res...

The radiocarbon (14 C) calibration curve so far contains annually resolved data only for a short period of time. With accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) matching the precision of decay counting, it is now possible to efficiently produce large datasets of annual resolution for calibration purposes using small amounts of wood. The radiocarbon interc...

Early researchers of radiocarbon levels in Southern Hemisphere tree rings identified a variable North-South hemispheric offset, necessitating construction of a separate radiocarbon calibration curve for the South. We present here SHCal20, a revised calibration curve from 0-55,000 cal BP, based upon SHCal13 and fortified by the addition of 14 new tr...

Dendrochronological analysis was undertaken on eight ex situ oak timbers removed from the collapsed roof of the West Mural Tower at Auckland Castle. Although the samples contained relatively short annual growth-ring sequences, this analysis produced a single site chronology (AUKBSQ03) comprising five samples from common rafters, this site chronolog...

Tree-ring analysis undertaken on samples from roof timbers of the Dovecote, The Old Hall (hall and cross-wing), and the Barn, resulted in the dating of 25 samples in four site sequences by dendrochronology. Additionally, four samples which form a fifth site sequence have been dated by radiocarbon wiggle-matching. Site sequence BARDSQ01 contains nin...

Nine oak timbers from the two-truss roof and one oak timber from the first-floor ceiling were sampled for dendrochronology. Cross-matching of the ring-width series from these samples produced two site-master chronologies. The first contained eight timbers (seven from the roof and the ceiling timber) and was 118- years long, with two samples probabl...

Elm samples were taken from the hall roof, from which oak timbers had been previously dated, along with some additional oak samples. One oak sample was dated to the period AD 1362–1480, having a likely felling date range compatible with the tree-ring date previously determined for the roof (spring AD 1493). Three elm samples matched each other, and...

A number of elm timbers were initially assessed as being potentially useful for ring-width dendrochronology. These were in two main areas within the building, a stud wall in the basement of the building fronting onto King’s Quay Street, which also included some oak elements, and a first-floor room to the south-west which includes the likely end gab...

Elm samples were taken from the central and east trusses and their associated timbers in the east-west range roof. Dendrochronological analysis identified three pairs of samples that cross-matched each other. No other cross-matching was identified and no reliable cross-dating was found when these elm series were compared to the oak reference databa...

Dendrochronological analysis was undertaken on samples from seven oak timbers in the roof of this building. This analysis produced a single site master chronology, comprising four samples (HIHHSQ01), which is 107 rings long overall. Despite being compared to an extensive corpus of reference chronologies, no satisfactory consistent cross-matching co...

Dendrochronological analysis was undertaken on cores from 15 of the 16 timbers sampled in the roof of number 4 Walseker Lane, near Rotherham in South Yorkshire, the sample from one timber having too few rings for dating. This analysis produced a single site chronology, which included ten ring-width series that could be securely cross-matched statis...

Nine timbers were sampled from this building. The ring series derived from five of these timbers were found to cross-match and were combined to form a 101-year site master chronology, LSCMt5. Two of the cross-matched samples retained complete sapwood which indicated that the timbers represented were derived from trees felled at the same time. The r...

Ring-width dendrochronology was undertaken on elm timbers from two structural phases, producing an undated 93-year long elm site chronology from core samples taken from seven roof timbers. A small number of oak timbers had been analysed previously, with a single timber of the main frame having a likely felling date range of AD 1649–81 and a tiebeam...

Tree-ring analysis was undertaken on 21 samples from timbers thought to be associated with the primary construction, as well as from timbers considered to be related to a potentially later rebuilding of the aisles. This resulted in the construction of two site sequences, the 168-ring SVNSSQ01, which contained 11 samples, and the 71-ring SVNSSQ02, w...

Core samples were taken from four lintels and in situ measurement was undertaken on six planks of the main door of this church for dendrochronological analysis. This resulted in the construction of two site chronologies, CUTHSQ01 comprising the ring series from six planks and CUTHSQ02 comprising the ring series from two of the lintels. Unfortunatel...

Environmental reconstructions from pollen records collected within archaeological landscapes have traditionally taken a broadly narrative approach, with few attempts made at hypothesis testing or formal assessment of uncertainty. This disjuncture between the traditional interpretive approach to palynological data and the requirement for detailed, l...

In 2018 Pearson et al. published a new sequence of annual radiocarbon (14 C) data derived from oak (Quercus sp.) trees from Northern Ireland and bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) from North America across the period 1700-1500 BC. The study indicated that the more highly resolved shape of an annually based calibration dataset could improve the accur...

Archaeological excavations at Çatalhöyük represent one of the most extensive, detailed and long-standing investigations at any Neolithic settlement in the world. James Mellaart was the first to investigate the site between 1961 and 1965, then the excavations were reopened by Ian Hodder from 1993 to 2017. Both research projects fully reflect importa...

These guidelines provide advice on best practice for the effective use of scientific dating on English Pleistocene sites. They are primarily intended for: curators and project managers who advise local planning authorities, issue briefs and write specifications or written schemes of investigation and those working on development-led or research pro...

These guidelines provide advice on best practice for the effective use of scientific dating on Pleistocene sites. They are applicable to all archaeological projects, but are aimed primarily at those undertaken as part of the planning process. Pleistocene sites typically produce limited material that is suitable for dating. Some of the methods that...

Excavations in the Gdańsk (GDN) Area on the Çatalhöyük East Mound included a series of buildings and open spaces assigned to the Late and Final Phases of occupation. These excavations are related to previous investigations in the 1960s as well as the first decade of the 21st century in Mellaart A and B Areas and the Team Poznań (TP) Area respective...

Bayesian chronological modelling of radiocarbon dates from the Brochtorff Circle at Xagħra, Gozo, Malta (achieved through the ToTL and FRAGSUS projects), provides a more precise chronology for the sequence of development and use of a cave complex. Artefacts show that the site was in use from the Żebbuġ period of the late 5th/early 4th millennium ca...

This study tests whether accurate dating by AMS radiocarbon wiggle-matching short tree-ring series (c. 30 annual rings) in the period after AD 1510 can be achieved routinely. Such an approach has proved problematic for some intervals in the period AD 1160–1541 (Bayliss et al., 2017), which are before single-year calibration data are available (Stui...

The strengths of formal Bayesian chronological modelling are restated, combining as it does knowledge of the archaeology with the radiocarbon dating of carefully chosen samples of known taphonomy in association with diagnostic material culture. The risks of dating bone samples are reviewed, along with a brief history of the development of approache...