Signing up enhances your TCE experience with the ability to save items to your personal reading list, and access the interactive map. For those researchers working in the field of human history, the chronology of events remains a major element of reflection. Archaeologists have access to various techniques for dating archaeological sites or the objects found on those sites. There are two main categories of dating methods in archaeology : indirect or relative dating and absolute dating. Relative dating includes methods that rely on the analysis of comparative data or the context eg, geological, regional, cultural in which the object one wishes to date is found. This approach helps to order events chronologically but it does not provide the absolute age of an object expressed in years. Relative dating includes different techniques, but the most commonly used are soil stratigraphy analysis and typology.

Small tubes containing CO2 derived from artifacts are placed in an accelerator mass spectrometer AMS. The AMS will measure the relative proportions of carbon isotopes to determine the objects age. Relative techniques were developed earlier in the history of archaeology as a profession and are considered less trustworthy than absolute ones. There are several different methods.

Dating in archaeology is the process of assigning a chronological value to an event in the past. Philosophers differ on how an event is defined, but for cultural history, it can be taken as a change in some entity: the addition, subtraction, or transformation of parts. Events can be considered at two scales. At the scale of individual object, the event is either manufacture which, e. At the scale of more than one object, often called an assemblage, the event is usually the deposition of those objects at a single place.