Philosophers and physicists have long debated the nature of time (Dainton 2010), a subject that the historical sciences, surprisingly, have put less effort into. While archaeology has delved into the methods and techniques of dating in considerable detail, less attention has been paid to how these should be employed toward our goal of understanding the archaeological record. In this essay, I review some theoretical aspects of dating, and in this context, discuss the utility of various methods as they are currently understood and practiced.
The reality of the past, the present, and the future has long puzzled philosophers. Some say only the present is real, others that the past and the present are real, and still others that all three are real. I am not qualified to discuss the merits of these three positions, but as an archaeologist, I find attractive the view that only the present is real (although maybe only as a first approximation because in relativity theory, the present is...
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Feathers, J. (2018). Dating Techniques in Archaeological Science. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_326-2
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