The methods that made archaeology quantitative.
10 topics · 9 curated works
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Radiocarbon Dating
Willard F. Libby · 1960
Sets out how the near-constant production of carbon-14 by cosmic rays, and its steady decay once an organism dies, gives archaeology a single…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Climatic Cycles and Tree-Growth
A. E. Douglass · 1919
Shows that tree rings record annual climate variation precisely enough to be cross-matched between living and dead wood, building the first…
+4 more at this level
9 works
Willard F. Libby
Sets out how the near-constant production of carbon-14 by cosmic rays, and its steady decay once an organism dies, gives archaeology a single physical clock, and describes the counting method Libby built to read it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Geoff A. T. Duller
A practical guide for English Heritage arguing that luminescence dating is reliable enough for routine use in commercial archaeology, but only if excavators collect and record samples correctly in the field, since no laboratory analysis can fix a badly taken sample.
Arlen F. Chase et al.
Argues from a single airborne LiDAR survey that Caracol was a far larger, causeway-linked settlement than decades of ground survey had mapped, showing remote sensing can recover urban-scale patterns invisible from the forest floor.
Svante Pääbo
Recounts how sequencing DNA extracted from fossil bone showed that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, turning ancient DNA into direct physical evidence for events in the human past that no artefact could show.
link checked 17 Sept 2026A. E. Douglass
Shows that tree rings record annual climate variation precisely enough to be cross-matched between living and dead wood, building the first chronology that could date a site absolutely rather than relatively.
127 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Karl W. Butzer
Argues that archaeological sites can only be interpreted within a reconstructed physical environment, building geoarchaeology and human ecology into a single contextual method for reading a landscape's history alongside its artefacts.
Christopher Bronk Ramsey
Argues that a set of individually imprecise radiocarbon dates can be combined with a site's stratigraphic order, using Bayesian statistics, into a calendar chronology far tighter than any one date allows on its own.
Copley et al.
Argues from lipid residues absorbed into pottery walls that dairying was already widespread in Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain, evidence no bone assemblage or artefact typology could have supplied on its own.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Damian H. Evans et al.
Argues from airborne laser scanning that the urban area around Angkor was far larger and more densely engineered than ground survey had ever shown, revealing an entire hydraulic city hidden under forest canopy.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.