XRONOS as a Resource for Archaeological Chronology in West Asia
Joe Roe and Martin Hinz
Paper presented at Digital Ancient Near Eastern Studies (DANES) Conference, Virtual, 4–6 December 2024, 2024.
Abstract
XRONOS is an open data infrastructure for the backbone of the archaeological record – chronology. It provides open access to published radiocarbon dates and other chronometric data from any period, anywhere in the world. In this talk, we introduce XRONOS and with an eye on its coverage of West Asia. This currently comprises 22,739 records of radiocarbon dates ranging from 50,000 BP to the present. This makes it one of the better-represented regions of the world in terms of radiocarbon data – largely thanks to a long history of regional compilation. Geographic coverage is relatively even, considering the large differences in historic population density between different parts of the region. A detailed assessment and literature review of the radiocarbon corpus from Eastern Iran shows that XRONOS’ dataset is fairly comprehensive, but that the quality of the metadata accompanying individual dates can be substantially improved with the benefit of regional expertise. On the other hand, XRONOS’ coverage of other types of chronological information in West Asia is currently limited to rough typological determinations collected alongside radiocarbon data. This produces a marked temporal bias towards the period c. 3000 to 11500 cal BP and limits its usefulness for chronological work in the protohistoric and historic periods of West Asia. Incorporating more types of chronometric data to address this problem is one of our main goals for the development of XRONOS in the near term.