Tools for Constructing Chronologies focuses on ways of getting more out of existing chronological data by careful analysis. It surveys a range of cutting edge methods in chronology construction and seeks to enable cross-disciplinary fertilisation of ideas.

The specially invited papers cover a range of timescales, from the perspectives of a number of disciplines. The methods used range from complex statistical treatments, to (non-statistical) considerations of how to systematically represent relative dating information. Each chapter can be read alone, but they are also carefully cross-referenced. The editors' introductory essay provides a cross-disciplinary overview of the state of chronology construction methods, and highlights the links between them.

This book will appeal to a wide range of researchers, scientists and graduate students using chronologies in their work; from applied statisticians to archaeologists, geologists and paleontologists, to those working in bioinformatics and chronometry.

Written for:
Doctoral students, practitioners

• Preface: Towards Integrated Thinking in Chronology Building
• Bayesian Chronological Data Interpretation: Where Now
• Pragmatic Bayesians: A Decade of Integrating Radiocarbon Dates into Chronological Models
• Bayesian Inference of Calibration Curves: Application to Archaeomagnetism
• The Synchronization of Civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Second Millennium BC: Natural Science Dating Attempts
• Applications of Formal Model Choice to Archaeological Chronology Building
• Complicated Relations and Blind Dating: Formal Analysis of Relative Chronological Structures
• Genealogies from Time-Stamped Sequence Data
• Tephrochronology and Its Application to Late Quaternary Environmental Reconstruction, with Special Reference to the North Atlantic Islands
• Constructing Chronologies of Sea-Level Change from Salt-Marsh Sediments
• A Framework for Analysing Fossil Record Data
• Taking Bayes Beyond Radiocarbon: Bayesian Approaches to Some Other Chronometric Methods
• Index.