The Discovery Programme

The dating of finds – be they artifacts, monuments, sites, skeletal material (human or non-human) or palaeo-environmental samples - is of fundamental importance  in archaeology.

The most basic dating method (and the most basic fact upon which archaeology itself is founded) is stratification.  This is based on the observable fact that as life progresses the remains of the past are laid down on (and in) the ground and are ultimately buried in a series of chronologically datable layers – in simple terms, the oldest being at the bottom and the most recent nearest the top.

That idea was borrowed into archaeology from the older science of geology.  Of course stratification is rarely as straightforward as we would like; all sorts of things can disturb the simple, natural layering process.

Consequently a battery of other dating methods have been devised (or borrowed from other subjects) to fine-tune the chronology in question.  Older methods include dating by historical association, or by using the comparative ideas established for much longer period by art- and architectural-historians.  Formerly there was a practice of dating by pollen analysis (see below) but as more precise methods became available (see below) this method has fallen out of use although pollen analysis is still widely used for environmental reconstruction.

Developments in the physical sciences in the mid twentieth century led to the discovery of a range of scientific dating (and analytic) methods which would have been a wonder to older generations.

We now know as a fundamental fact that most things in our world carry within themselves records of their own history and evolution.

Many of the new scientific methods of dating and analysis – such as radiocarbon-dating and dendrochronology - are now commonplace in Irish archaeology as in the research projects of the Discovery Programme.