Open chronometric data for archaeology

Photo: Şahin Sezer Dinçer on Unsplash
Site 73,430

Sites

radiocarbon date 350,190

Radiocarbon dates

typological date 138,176

Typological dates

Coming soon! —

Dendro dates

Map showing the density of chronometric records in XRONOS

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.

Latest news

Improved data browser performance and new download options

Attentive and/or impatient users might have noticed that XRONOS’ data browser got significantly faster recently. With nearly half a million dates and over 70,000 site records, our backend processes had been struggling not just to display it on the data browser’s map, but to serve large result sets through the JSON API. This meant that API requests for large sets of dates (e.g. the globe, or sometimes just a whole country) would often fail, with knock-on effects on server stability for all users. Happily, thanks to a number of recent behind-the-scenes performance improvements by Martin Hinz, we have overcome these problems. The data browser is snappier and API requests for e.g. all radiocarbon dates from Switzerland are now functional again – and fast! Read more...

2024-07-26

Standardised taxonomic data for radiocarbon samples

Radiocarbon dating can be applied to any type of organic materials. But where possible, archaeologists try to collect an identifiable piece of preserved animal or plant tissue, because knowing what species it came from is often necessary to obtain a reliable date. For example, species with diets high in marine food produce apparent ages older than their true age due to the marine reservoir effect, and this needs to be corrected for. When radiocarbon dates are responsibly published, this taxonomic information will be reported alongside the age determination and other important information about the sample. Most of our source databases recorded this in turn, but practices for doing so varied widely. One author might record a sample of human bone as “Homo sapiens”, where another calls it “human femur” or another “Menschenknochen”. So anyone searching for dates on a particular taxon will find it difficult to predict all the ways it might show up in XRONOS. Read more...

2023-12-21

XRONOS development in 2022

There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes work on XRONOS this year. Our primary focused has been building a back-end interface for importing and curating data. This will be the foundation of more visible changes next year, when we will start a push to significantly improve the accuracy and consistency of the database. Read more...

2022-12-20

The map of XRONOS receives a clustered visualisation

Sometimes you are overtaken by your own success. This is what happened to us: The last update added so much data to the database that even current browsers and computers are overwhelmed by the display of all the sites on the map in XRONOS. Currently, more than 22,000 sites are displayed. As a result, the use of the map has been significantly slowed down and impeded. Read more...

2021-10-02
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