Can Bayesian models be applied to broad cultural chronologies?

[סיגל לביא - אלבז‎‎]

Hi everyone, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this:

In regional-scale radiocarbon studies (e.g., analyzing the timing of cultural phases across multiple sites), how reasonable is it to apply a Bayesian framework that models the chronological order of archaeological cultures ?

Or are methods like summed probability distributions (SPD) preferable for these kinds of questions — even if they don't impose stratigraphic logic?

Appreciate any insights — thanks!

[Felix Riede]

Hi,

if you can make a good argument for why the assumptions that go into such a model are robust, I would say it is totally possible. But I would, of course, as we did something like this some years ago:

Riede, Felix, and Kevan Edinborough. “Bayesian Radiocarbon Models for the Cultural Transition during the Allerød in Southern Scandinavia.” Journal of Archaeological Science 39, no. 3 (2012): 744–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2011.11.008.

In that paper, we had to work with rather few dates so we ran comparable analyses at different tradeoffs between data quality (assessed by technical and contextual quality following Pettitt, P., C. Gamble, W. Davies, and M. Richards. “Palaeolithic Radiocarbon Chronology: Quantifying Our Confidence beyond Two Half-Lives.” Journal of Archaeological Science 30 (2003): 1685–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-4403(03)00070-0.) and sample size to see if the results were stable under different conditions. Maybe this provides some inspiration.

f.

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[סיגל לביא - אלבז‎‎]

Hi Felix,

Thanks a lot for your thoughtful answer and for sharing your paper — it’s really helpful to see how you approached it.

Best,
Sigal

‫בתאריך יום ב׳, 21 באפר׳ 2025 ב-23:21 מאת ‪'Felix Riede' via OxCal‬‏ <‪ox...@googlegroups.com‬‏>:‬

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[Christopher Ramsey]

Dear Sigal

You could look at the trapezium model for this type of phase (Lee and Bronk Ramsey 2012), since there are almost always overlaps - see:

https://doi.org/10.2458/azu_js_rc.v54i1.12397

This follows an earlier paper by Needham et al which used uniform phases:

https://doi.org/10.1080/00665983.1997.11078784


Best wishes

Christopher

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[סיגל לביא - אלבז‎‎]

Dear Prof. Ramsey,

Thank you very much for your kind and helpful reply.

I will certainly look further into the models you mentioned — they seem highly relevant to my research.

Best regards,

Sigal

‫בתאריך יום ג׳, 22 באפר׳ 2025 ב-11:24 מאת ‪'Christopher Ramsey' via OxCal‬‏ <‪ox...@googlegroups.com‬‏>:‬

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