 Good morning everyone. It's very nice to be here. I should say I think I'm getting a cold so I've got another voice to apologise for. It was very nice to see the cover of the book that Robin and I published 25 years ago on the screen just now and I should say that at the time we did that, Robin and I did have the intention of keeping that up to date and we did publish a few supplementary lists and then we sort of started thinking about a proper database and so on and it never happened. We were both occupied with other things but I'm delighted to see what we've got now and that's exactly the kind of thing I would have liked to have gone on to do and I'm really glad that it's being done. But today I'm not going to take you forward. I'm going to take you backwards in time, not in radiocarbon time but in years from now and just to tell you about the early stages of the introduction of radiocarbon dating to European prehistory and the impact it had. Now I'm aware that this is ancient history for most of you but for me it actually spans my whole academic career. I did my undergraduate degree in the early 1960s and what we were talked was a pre-radiocarbon version of European prehistory. So this is the kind of chronology of these early stages and although we were getting dates coming through in the 1960s the main thing that was going on at that stage was just discussion about the validity of the method and there were quite a few distinguished archaeologists who just denied that it could possibly be right because they were so invested in the pre-radiocarbon chronology that the version of European prehistory that went with it but they just couldn't accept it and it was the work of Colin Renfrew really that forced all of us to accept and not just to accept that it was right but to start taking on the implications and so on and it really was massive because obviously I've only chosen a few of these to discuss and I'm just going to talk about the development of the diffuse interpretations of European prehistory and the stretching of the timeframes and then what is perhaps not discussed so often is clustering of dates and gaps in sequences that characterize the early stages of the introduction of the method and then I'm just to show you that I haven't completely abandoned the present, I'm just going to give you just one case study that relates to the present. So the abandonment of the diffusionist framework for European prehistory was a really big thing and it wasn't just that we had a different chronology we had to abandon the whole structure and I've got this is the next two slides come from Colin's book and that was sort of how it the whole of European prehistory of later prehistory was meant to work it was all introduced from the east and spread across Europe in that kind of way and west and north following different routes and I have to say that the quality of the slides I'm showing relate to the age of the Arctic forest and I think it's better to keep these originals rather than put fancy new versions of them on. Now there were lots and lots of examples but the one that I'm going to illustrate is this one that relates to megalithic tombs and when I dug this out again I was taken right back to my undergraduate classes with Glyn Daniel on a course on megalithic tombs of Europe and it was taught in this way and so when we got this was all altered by the what Colin Renfrew called the first radio carbon revolution just the emission dates before we knew about the tree ring calibration and megalithic too to one of the sort of first things to go as it were and we had to accept not only that we had much earlier dates for all the northern and western groups but we had to abandon the whole arguments of how this spread and and we had to recognize with this topic and with many many others that the links that we had depended on were really largely illusory and when I think back on to back to that course by Glyn Daniel on megalithic tombs I realized that the links were all in terms of two we didn't we didn't look at tomb structures some of these tombs that are in early areas and rock cut tombs others are above ground built tombs we didn't look at very all right we didn't look at what was the material culture in the tombs it was all tomb plans that allowed us to build up this completely full sprainwork and you've got exactly the same kind of thing happening with with all the the other sort of structures that collapsed when we realized what the true trilogy was so that was a big shock to the system and of course when we started to get the the tree ring calibration which was not so much later it made things even worse and it affected later periods as well and this is how Collin Rimford illustrated it with with both things of time frame and geographically where this rock chair came so we really had to kind of completely reorganize our ways of thinking it wasn't just that we had different dates and and so then if I move on to the the stretching of of the time frames um uh lots of phases had to be subdivided um uh the um and in other cases they were just enormously um stretched and actually the best example I can think of this um comes not from the Mediterranean but from the British Neolithic um where uh Stuart Piggott had published a book in um 1954 which therefore just before we were getting these dates um called the Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles and um in that he argued that the British Neolithic lasted for 400 years actually he did suggest there were other possibilities but he went for the shortest one which was unfortunate in retrospect but um and think about it we now know it lasts for more than 2000 years so um and that gives us a completely different um understanding of what was going on in 400 years you know they're all rushing around throwing up uh um long burrows and uh megalithic tombs and causewayed enclosures and hinges you know non-stop it was also an actual pack and now that we've got this all stretched out you can see that that phases of um uh of monument building phases that are uh much apparently more static and and so on so we have this kind of thing going on all over the place um so then um and along with that um we made us really look again and we've had to look again at the um uh the pace of change and a good example there would be the um the copper age um in the central Mediterranean so it used to be thought to be a short really short introductory phase a sort of preliminary to um the development of the full bronze age and so it wasn't looked at in um in any kind of detail or um or thought to be terribly important it was just you know as um um true bronze metallurgy was being developed this was just like a preliminary first state of course and we're going to hear um a paper about this uh a little bit later on you know we now see all kinds of um aspects of that and it was a long pace and it it so um and that was just one example again we have um uh an understanding we have to have a different understanding of social economic and technological change when we realize how stretched it is compared to the the version that I was taught in the 1960s um then um the other thing I had picked up on was um oh a minute this um gaps in the sequences and the clustering of dates now this to some extent was a a temporary phenomenon um but when we first started getting um I've just said significant numbers but I shouldn't use the word significant statistically qualifications but when we started getting a reasonable number of radio carbon dates um uh for um uh mediterranean prehistory but it applied elsewhere as well the other things that emojis these sort of dates cluster and it hasn't disappeared all together now but um it was very noticeable in the early stages and there were gaps in the sequences and this is something I plotted in I think this is a paper I published in 1978 with my first attempt to look at um um uh the implications of radio carbon dating and the tree ring um calibration for italian prehistory and so you have to forgive me because it was a long time ago but um one of the things that emerged was these hatched areas which were gaps in the sequences and as they appeared then the left hand one with um uncalibrated dates and the right hand side with calibrated dates making the gaps longer and this kind of thing happened in other areas too um and it's I mean as I said it was a temporary phenomenon um as time went on people realised there were gaps we we got dates for them um but um I think it's something that deserves just a little bit of attention because it isn't entirely obvious why it should be the case um the you know if you think of a kind of hypothetical prehistoric sequence of cultures periods whatever you want to call them in any area when we started getting radio carbon dates it's not really obvious why they weren't evenly distributed through those sequences but they weren't and they weren't in most of the areas that I've ever looked at and um I think it is worth um um asking the question why that should be the case and my temporary answer anyway is that um there just are phases that are easier to recognise archaeologically and I suggest these are phases of stable settlement and stable adaptation which present themselves in a very clear way and there's other phases which may be phases of social change um don't present themselves in quite that way um so as I said this was a kind of temporary phenomenon um we uh did um in this our area and in other areas um uh then fill the gaps um once we realised they were there we started looking for things and in some areas it was more significant than others I mean in in Greece um they had to create an entirely new phase called the final Neolithic to fill a gap between the late Neolithic and the early Bronze Age which previously had been thought to be you know one following the other so um I think that's a sort of lengthy issue that we can um we can still address um or perhaps we ought to address why it should be like that um so okay where are we now in the present day um I would say at one level um we have a pretty good pre um chronology for the later prehistory of the west Mediterranean largely thanks to radiocarp and um although as we've seen from the signs that we just saw in the previous presentation um it's patchy and the gaps and so on to be filled um it is the case now and I think those of you who dig in the Central Mediterranean will know this we actually when we send your samples off the radiocarp and most of the time you know what the results are going to be within broad limits and they're really disappointing now this isn't the um an argument that we've in fact we should stop terming radiocarbons on of course um radiocarbon dating um uh but I think we need to think about a bit more carefully what we do it shouldn't um these aren't accusations that I'm throwing out I don't even really in particular um but there's a tendency I think for um this just to become a an archaeological method that um people use so if you're in a period where radiocarbons dating is rather then you will collect your samples and you'll get them dated and that is probably um um not the best way to go about things and I think we need to use um the method more selectively um and we need to we need to get better quality samples better contextualized samples we need to use the Bayesian statistics to um to refine what we're doing and um uh as I'm just going to um in my last couple of minutes talk about the one example that um uh I told you I'd give you for the present day the wiggle match um uh technique with uh dendropronology is something that can give us greater precision and um uh can help us do it so um I think we ought to be addressing specific chronological problems rather than just sort of tightening up the chronology generally and this is my example um uh the um recently published article last year um and the title of the article tells you exactly what it's doing um and um this particular issue of the uh the date of the transition from the final Bronze Age um to the early Iron Age in Italy as well that's been um problematic now for really quite a long time uh it was always traditionally given as 900 BC um and this was something that had been derived indirectly from the supposed dates for the Greek colonies in southern Italy and Sicily um applied to the material culture and um and then to the indigenous culture um associated with it and then taken to uh to date the whole Italian Iron Age um and then um the dates northern Italian Iron Age has always had close connections with central Europe and the Halstatt culture um uh it that proved to be problematic when we started to get uh very precise um dendropronological dates for wooden structures in um Halstatt burials um which you couldn't really quarrel with um and that sort of pushed the dates uh earlier and um by um uh by extension uh that of the the early Iron Age in Italy and um mostly um I mean there's been a lot of work and people have argued for various dates between 900 and um 1000 BC um since then but the real tendency is for people to say oh I'm going to ignore all that and just use the traditional chronology which is a little bit irritating but anyway um we don't have uh free ring sequences going back from the present day to the Iron Age in Italy as we do for central Europe um but the wiggle match um technique which I'm sure you all know and so I'm therefore not going to describe will give you greater precision and this was applied to um two uh tombs of the very end of the Bronze Age um um Peccellana which is in the province of Blackburner and um uh these gave precise dates or pretty much precise dates uh for these two tombs um and um allowed therefore um the uh a more precise date to be given to this transition which is now suggested to be between 975 and 960 or 950 BC so um I'm going to stop there and uh just to uh indicate that um I think the future is to be using radio carbon to address um really uh quite specific um chronological problems and they don't all have to be in this uh relatively late period they could we have chronological problems in other periods but rather than just um just one of those things you do if you're digging a prehistoric site so thank you