![]() ![]() There may provoke also harassment and emergence of fundamental hermeneutical questions which serve as the basis of a synoptic and synthetic philosophy that combines art and science corresponding to classical techne, logos and ethos. If radiocarbon measurements are to be used at all for chronological purposes, we have to use statistical meth-ods for calibration. The most widely used method of calibration can be seen as a simple application of Bayesian statistics, which uses both the information from the new measurement and information from the 14 C calibration curve. In most dating applications, however, we have larger numbers of 14 C measurements and we wish to relate those to events in the past. Baye-sian statistics provides a coherent framework in which such analysis can be performed and is becoming a core element in many 14 C dating projects. This article gives an overview of the main model components used in chronological analysis, their mathematical formulation, and examples of how such analyses can be performed using the latest version of the OxCal soft-ware (v4). Many such models can be put together, in a modular fashion, from simple elements, with defined constraints and groupings. In other cases, the commonly used "uniform phase" models might not be appropriate, and ramped, exponential, or normal distributions of events might be more useful. When considering analyses of these kinds, it is useful to be able run sim-ulations on synthetic data. Methods for performing such tests are discussed here along with other methods of diagnosing pos-sible problems with statistical models of this kind. ![]()
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