Yay, for once somebody at Sb except me is writing about European archaeology! SciBling Chris at Highly Allochthonous offers a long thoughtful writeup of a recent geology paper on the post-glacial flooding of the Black Sea basin and its possible effect on neolithisation. With a beautiful colour map of the European neolithisation wave!
Note that all the radiocarbon dates in Chris's entry are uncalibrated ones. 8300 BP is the raw radiocarbon date for the flood event, but that isn't equivalent to 6300 BC, it's more like 7400 cal BC. (The Maglemose era, for you Scandies.) Free on-line radiocarbon calibration and an explanation for why it's needed can be had at OxCal's site.
More like this
When I was an undergrad in 1990 we were taught that all six periods of the Scandinavian Bronze Age were 200 (or in one case 300) years long. The most recent radiocarbon work shows that they all had different lengths and were more likely 130-280 years long.
Recently I organised a few days' excavation that didn't turn up the kind of stuff I was hoping for.
20 years ago, radiocarbon dating was transformed by the widespread adoption of AMS analysis, accelerator mass spectroscopy. Willard Libby's original scintillation-counting method demanded large sample sizes and a lot of time per sample.
Archaeological chronology aims to answer the question "When did this or that event happen?". This question can usually be re-phrased as "When was this or that thing made?", where the thing under study may be anything from a bead up to the Great Wall of China.
Your link to Chris's article is broken.
http://scienceblogs.com/highlyallochthonous/2007/11/the_black_sea_flood…
Whoops, thanks!
Thanks for the link! Out of interest, why do you say the results in the paper are uncalibrated? They talk about calibrating the dates (and mention using OxCal for the flooding dates), and give everything in calender years BP, so I assumed that they had.
Not having read the paper, I didn't say anything about what the dates are like there. But in your entry, you translated BP to BC by simply subtracting 2000, which is misleading.