/rcarbon

Methods for calibrating and analysing radiocarbon dates

Primary LanguageR

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rcarbon

This package enables the calibration and analysis of radiocarbon dates, often but not exclusively for the purposes of archaeological research. It includes functions not only for basic calibration, uncalibration, and plotting of one or more dates, but also a statistical framework for building demographic and related longitudinal inferences from aggregate radiocarbon date lists, including: Monte-Carlo simulation test (Timpson et al 2014), random mark permutation test (Crema et al 2016, Bevan et al 2017) point-to-point test (Edinborough et al 2017), and spatial permutation test (Crema, Bevan, and Shennan 2017).

To install the stable version from CRAN:

install.packages('rcarbon')

To install the latest development version:

# "devtools" package required 
devtools::install_github('ahb108/rcarbon')

References

Bevan, A. Colledge,S., Fuller, D., Fyfe, R., Shennan, S., Stevens, C. 2017.Holocene fluctuations in human population demonstrate repeated links to food production and climate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. doi:10.1073/pnas.1709190114

Crema, E.R., Bevan, A., Shennan, S., 2017. Spatio-temporal approaches to archaeological radiocarbon dates. Journal of Archaeological Science 87, 1–9. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2017.09.007

Crema, E.R., Habu, J., Kobayashi, K., Madella, M., 2016. Summed Probability Distribution of 14 C Dates Suggests Regional Divergences in the Population Dynamics of the Jomon Period in Eastern Japan. PLOS ONE 11, e0154809. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0154809

Edinborough, K., Porcic, M., Martindale, A., Brown, T.J., Supernant, K, Ames, K.M. 2017. Radiocarbon test for demographic events in written and oral history, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114 (47), 12436–12441. doi:10.1073/pnas.1713012114

Timpson, A., Colledge, S., Crema, E., Edinborough, K., Kerig, T., Manning, K., Thomas, M.G., Shennan, S., 2014. Reconstructing regional population fluctuations in the European Neolithic using radiocarbon dates: a new case-study using an improved method. Journal of Archaeological Science 52, 549–557. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2014.08.011

Case Studies Using rcarbon

Crema, E.R., Bevan, A., Shennan, S., 2017. Spatio-temporal approaches to archaeological radiocarbon dates. Journal of Archaeological Science 87, 1–9. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2017.09.007

Palmisano, A., Bevan, A., Shennan, S. 2017. Comparing archaeological proxies for long-term population patterns: An example from central Italy. Journal of Archaeological Science, 87, 59-72. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2017.10.001

Riris, P. 2018 Dates as data revisited: A statistical examination of the Peruvian preceramic radiocarbon record. Journal of Archaeological Science, 97, 67-76. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2018.06.008

Tallavara, M., Personen, P. 2018. Human ecodynamics in the north-west coast of Finland 10,000–2000 years ago.Quaternary International,doi:/10.1016/j.quaint.2018.06.032