Statistical software for archaeology | Tangente

Invaluable statistical software

Bayesian statistics has become an essential technique for constructing chronologies of archaeological events.

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PublishedSeptember 23, 2019UpdatedSeptember 22, 20261 min read

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Several suitable software packages are available, including BCal (The BCal Team, 1999), OxCal (Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, 1994) and ChronoModel (CNRS, 2015). The last of these grew out of a French collaboration between two teams: one of archaeologists (Institut de recherche sur les archéomatériaux), the other of mathematicians (the Jean-Leray laboratory).

ChronoModel (w ww.chronomodel.com) can incorporate dates obtained using different methods: carbon-14 dating, archaeomagnetism, thermoluminescence, electron paramagnetic resonance… The a priori information essential to Bayesian modeling can easily be added. Here, a priori information means, for example, the period covered by the chronology under study, or stratigraphic relationships between archaeological events or groups of events.

The software is free and "open source" (its source code is open). Its user-friendly interface allows archaeologists to get to grips with it quickly. However, a sound knowledge of the mathematical tools involved, particularly Bayesian statistics, is still necessary to understand and interpret the results.

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