AustArch: A Database of 14C and Non-14C Ages from Archaeological Sites in Australia - Composition, Compilation and Review (Data Paper)

Internet Archaeology

Sean Ulm¹  Alan N. Williams²  Mike Smith³  Jill Reid⁴ 

[1] Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology, School of Arts and Social Sciences, James Cook University;

[2] Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University;

[3] National Museum of Australia;

[4] Niche Environment and Heritage, Australia;

关键词: database;    Australia;    Radiocarbon Dating;    Optically Stimulated Luminescence;    Thermoluminescence Dating;    Oxidisable Carbon;    Uranium-Series;    Electron Spin Resonance;    Cation Ratio Dating;    Amino Acid Racemization;    archaeology;   

DOI  :  10.11141/ia.36.6

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

It has been 20 years since Smith and Sharp (1993) undertook the first comprehensive review of archaeological ages across Australia and used them as a proxy for exploring human activity in the Pleistocene. It was a pioneering paper, building on the preliminary application of these techniques in Australia by Bird and Frankel (1991), and with several similar studies to follow (e.g. Holdaway and Porch 1996; Lourandos and David 1998; Ulm and Hall 1996). The last few years has witnessed increasing use of radiocarbon data as a mainstream proxy with which to explore archaeological trends, facilitated by the increasing publication of large datasets and the availability of calibration and statistical software such as Oxcal, Calpal and R (e.g. Buchanan et al. 2008, 2011; Collard et al. 2010a, 2010b; Peros et al. 2010). In Australia, these advances have not gone unnoticed and, as part of recent research, we have now compiled an archaeological age dataset for Australia. Here, we present the complete Australian dataset and undertake a brief review of its composition, strengths and weaknesses.