Dealing with Outliers and Offsets in Radiocarbon Dating

The wide availability of precise radiocarbon dates has allowed researchers in a number of disciplines to address chronological questions at a resolution which was not possible 10 or 20 years ago. The use of Bayesian statistics for the analysis of groups of dates is becoming a common way to integrate all of the 14 C evidence together. However, the models most often used make a number of assumptions that may not always be appropriate. In particular, there is an assumption that all of the 14 C measurements are correct in their context and that the original 14 C concentration of the sample is properly represented by the calibration curve. In practice, in any analysis of dates some are usually rejected as obvious…

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  Leverhulme Trust