.:: CAA 2010 -Fusion of Cultures- ::. Computer Applications in Archaeology, Granada (Spain) 6-9 April 2010

Out of Asia: A New Framework for Dating the Spread of Agriculture in Europe

The switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most significant economic and social changes in human history.  As part of an NERC funded collaborative project, staff at the University of Sheffield are directly dating the earliest cereals found on Neolithic sites across Europe and developing a tailored Bayesian statistical framework for their interpretation.  The statistical aspects of this work will be discussed at CAA2010.

The new framework allows incorporation of a large number of radiocarbon dates for cereals, takes account of the uncertainties associated with the radiocarbon dates, and provides a powerful tool for testing hypotheses concerning agricultural spread. It is constructed around a network-based space-time model.  The nodes in the network represent sites, of statistical and geographic importance, and edges indicate major corridors or geographical boundaries of unfavorable areas. The first arrival time at each node is estimated as a function of the network. The method used breaks down the estimation of the first arrival time into spread times along edges, thus explicitly disentangling the spatial dependence of the arrival time among neighboring sites and allowing geographic information and environmental conditions to enter as priors. AT CAA2010, preliminary results will be presented which show that the new model can provide reduced uncertainty on estimates of arrival times for nodes where data are available and make predictions (with clear uncertainty statements) about arrival times at the others.

Caitlin E. Buck holds a personal chair in the Department of Probability and Statistics of the University of Sheffield. Her primary research area is the development of modern statistical methods for archaeological, palaeoenvironmental and chronometric research. She has published in highly-regarded journals in statistics (e.g. Applied Statistics and Bayesian Analysis), chronometrics (e.g. Radiocarbon), palaeoenvironment (e.g.The Holocene and Quaternary Science Reviews) and archaeology (e.g. Antiquity).

She was PI on the project that developed BCal: an on-line Bayesian radiocarbon calibration service.

She is currently working on:

• chronology building as applied to studies of environmental change; particularly climate change as evidenced in long records such as ice cores,
• the dating of human population movements; both at the Pleistocene to Holocene transition and for understanding how and when modern farming practices arrived in Europe.
• models and methods for estimating radiocarbon
• elicitation of expert prior probabilities.