 that I do have a stutter which sometimes causes me to have breaks in my speech so please bear with me on that. I'd also like to note that Rowan has almost kind of lost his voice so this is my seat kind of interesting so just bear with us. Can you sign language? Yes. Or dance? Yes. But I'd like to say thanks to all of coming along on contributing to the session and in the introduction we're sort of going to really just talk a little bit about sort of how we arrived at wanting to do this session and a bit of our background so I'm trying to explain why there are two guys from Northern Ireland who have an interest in the Central but in the scientific dating in the Central and Western Mediterranean history and then to give a bit of a background of the kind of work which we are doing which can't perform this session I'm hoping that that might be able to direct some of the discussion on behalf so yes and then we also talked about a bit of housekeeping admin as well so all right so really as you guys might have been able to tell from the title it was loosely based off this volume which we're very happy to have both of the editors here so again this is sort of again something which whenever Rowan and I began to work with some of this we were drawn to this volume and thought it was very important and how it brought together and synthesized and I'm trying to really provide an update on the Central a Central database for a reader carton dating in Italian prehistory but bringing sort of impacting on the wider Central Mediterranean and this is sort of again 25 years since the foundation of the or since the EAA but also 25 years since the publication of this book so we thought I could sort of work together yeah I'm very sorry to do that so what we wanted to do was sort of give a quick overview of the contributions or then moving on to talk about well the state of the art as we see it so we've together over the last year have tried to update this database by sort of gathering together many of the reader carton dates that we produced since so we're going to talk a little bit about the coverage and some about and then Rowan's going to talk a little bit about sort of some of our or some of the methods where she's about and how we've been approaching the data set and then moving on to the session proper so yes so this is sort of just a bit of a general idea of what we're dealing with we have some papers that sort of deal with broader regions I think Rowan might have maybe changed the nature of all this talk so this might be a little less yeah yeah so yeah so this gives so this gives you an idea of what we're working on so um um so the first talk is being given by Ruth Whitehouse which is great again because we're getting this uh we're getting this overview of the impact that reader carton dating has had on central mediterranean prehistory um over the course of Ruth's career which is so we're then going to uh move on where Rowan's going to talk um his talking title for interesting chronological problems for central and western mediterranean prehistory so talking about some broad some broad issues and some um things which he has identified over the last few years of working with so we're then going to have a discussion slot and during the discussion slots it would be great if we could get the previous speakers up towards the front so then we can sort of have a bit of a better to improve after the discussion we're going to move on to talk by Mark Pierce and Roberto Magy and the reader carton chronology of the earliest you know west central and north western typically um we're then going to move on to see if you know going to move on to a talk by excuse me uh so yeah by Cristiano which will be covering the uh which will be discussing a new reader carton based sequence for early italian metalwork um after that we're then going to talk by myself which will be talking about rock cartoons in the central mediterranean we will then have another discussion slot and then we'll be then going down to this week we'll have a discussion from Dominica Gulley on the radio carton evidence from the territory um and then we're going to move all the way over to we're going to move all the way over to bronze age so we're we're going to have a um uh a talk led by could actually uh could you identify yourself who's talking about yes um okay so i knew i wasn't going to get nothing and then and then before then it's ending we're going to talk by johnton south san santana where we jump all the way down to just sort of on the very edge what we're talking about but i think there's still a really important case to be to bring in in terms of thinking of island or geologic uh talk title going into the deep blue sea new insights into the colonization of the canary islands in particular so that's just a bit of an overview of the session contents and now we're going to move on to the state of the artist we put would you like to take this yeah i mean this session we conceived of was a kind of uh a big launch pad for a big paper that we both wrote that we thought might be published by now but it's still under review so you know we can't really uh do that per se but we put all this data together for for this big publication and our database we try to get all the real carbon depths from the from the region together in one spatio temporal database and just analyze it to see what sort of patterns emerge uh it's a it's a fresh synthesis so we can both hitley and uh the sort of south eastern corner of france and multiple so uh how many tests do we have can you remember so there's about four thousand real carbon dates in the state of death and so we analyze them uh you know spatially we can plot out their distribution to look at where the most densely sampled parts of the landscape are and then we've been also methods that i've been developing over the last few years coming from ireland where we have this vast radio carbon uh you know like data set here and then there's lots of the richly sampled landscapes of northern europe with their huge radio carbon databases we wanted to do a kind of inter regional comparison to see what the what the trends and this overall scale is overall the overall wave of data actually tell us about the uh the dynamics of the past and today that we use this technique called terminal density estimation uh that produces these squiggly lines and what these squiggly lines are it's a bit like a histogram so if you imagine that the area under these squiggly lines is the relative amount of dates that we have and from these time series it's a bit like looking at the price of stocks or shares and the stock exchange or or you know population numbers or whatnot but it tells us at least at a very basic level how well sampled the archaeological uh the landscape is at any one point in time for how well dated it is i should say and then you can begin to unpack that you can say is this because of where research interests are is this because of where the sites are best preserved or is this simply an artifact of the underlying demographic trends in the past the population and in our paper we discussed this and you know come up with all kinds of uh uh you know ideas about the explanations as to why this maybe so but i suppose our point is that we can actually exist maybe overall general synthesis uh we want to just show you a map of how the all this data that you know the fundamentally we're going to be talking about in this session actually plays out if i can do this so this is this is what happens if you plot a map of the central Mediterranean and and just sort of look at it in each time slice and look at where all the radio carbon dates are so see here in the mesolithic period there's a broader the sparsely sampled landscape with the reasonably well-known mesolithic sites yes i'll reconfigure this you know so this is a familiar aspect of mesolithic hunter-gatherer archaeology everywhere there's new rail easily recognizable pattern that then exists spatio-temporally until really we get into the Neolithic which is about the which is about to appear jump over from the Balkans here it comes there we go so you know these are the early Neolithic sites of southern Italy that sort of impressed pottery traditions it really becomes a lot more widespread as we get into the the six millenniums occurring all over the peninsula jumps down in Malta right now and you can see where the where the just the sort of the northern boot and these patterns are well that's something that you know plays out as we look at all the maps verbs look at all that frames the animation as we get into the copper age there's various you know richly sampled sites and parts of the landscape that are well known then as we get into the bronze age there's the great intensification and you know the pope's land and we see the you know the huge uh you know what's also very interesting is that you can actually visualize really nicely um in the bronze age the the ship the ship from the margins of the alps that they pull out at settlement then down onto the bow valley of the Terramara and you really see that ship in this map and again that's what's so exciting about this kind of coaching that allows us to really visualize some of these important ships and settlement so methodologically it's quite a departure from sort of you know what's going before there's a slightly new way of modeling the dev and thinking about the trends inherent to and uh and then it's sort of as the iron age goes on the really the amount of radiocarbon data that they have just starts to dwindle away because uh partly because it genuinely does dwindle away and partly because uh there's we sort of relaxed our particular pressure of research but this is I mean this is still early days for these sorts of techniques um uh I think really our purpose of showing you this was to just demonstrate that this is an incredibly rich and uh multi-dimensional data set that you know will certainly keep us occupied for years to come and unpacking its nuances so I think really uh that's all we want to say by way of an introduction to the session and an introduction to the to the data set that we've out there