Chapter Abstracts

Below is a list of chapter abstracts:
Select Chapter 1. Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice 2. Repeating the Unrepeatable Experiment 3. Experimental Archaeology at the Cross Roads: A Contribution to Interpretation or Evidence of ‘Xeroxing’?  4. ‘Proportional Representation’: Multiple voices in Archaeological Interpretation at Çatalhöyük 5. Integrating Database Design and Use into Recording Methodologies 6. The Tyranny of Typologies: Evidential Reasoning in Romano-Egyptian Domestic Archaeology 7. The Archaeological Bazaar: Scientific Methods for Sale? Or: ‘Putting the ‘Arch-’ Back into Archaeometry’ 8. Radiocarbon Dating and Archaeology: History, Progress and Present Status 9. Using Evidence from Natural Sciences in Archaeology 10. Working the Digital: Some Thoughts from Landscape Archaeology 11. Crafting Knowledge with (Digital) Visual Media in Archaeology 12. Uncertain on Principle: Combining Lines of Archaeological Evidence to Create Chronologies 13. Lessons from Modelling Neolithic Farming Practice: Methods of Elimination 14. Evidence, Archaeology and Law: An initial Exploration 15. Law and Archaeology: Modified Wigmorean Analysis 16. Traditional Knowledge, Archaeological Evidence, and Other Ways of Knowing 17. Evidence of What? On the Possibilities of Archaeological Interpretation 18. Meeting Pasts Halfway: A Consideration of the Ontology of Material Evidence in Archaeology 19. Matter and Facts: Material Culture and the History of Science

Uncertain on Principle: Combining Lines of Archaeological Evidence to Create Chronologies
Alex Bayliss and Alasdair Whittle
With the underlying principle that our measurement of time is fundamentally linked to uncertainty, we explore how Bayesian chronological models are constructed by weaving together different strands of scientific and archaeological evidence. We illustrate the application of formal modelling to a variety of archaeological situations, from individual sites to chrono-typologies, seriations and timescapes, and we consider how multiple interpretations are judged. We discuss the impact and consequences of the widespread availability of the radically improved chronologies, which formally modelled estimates bring to the construction and interpretation of our narratives.