By Joe Roe, 2025-03-20 10:34:48 UTC
We are very pleased to report that 2024 was the first year in which multiple researched articles were published based on chronological data from XRONOS.
Schirrmacher et al. (2024) used more than 1300 radiocarbon dates from XRONOS and other repositories to refine the chronology of the development of cereal agriculture in Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe. Using a large number of radiocarbon dates combined with close attention to the contexts of these dates and associated archaeobotanical region, they were able to trace the development of early agricultural systems in response to climate change in more detail than previously possible. For example, pin-pointing when farmers in both regions began to plant more barley than wheat, around 2800–2700 BCE.
Bilotti et al. (2024) extracted a large dataset of absolutely-dated sites from the Western Mediterranean in order to model the routes and networks through which ivory was traded in the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age; as they write, XRONOS was suited for this purpose because it is “the most comprehensive collection of 14C samples available […] most of the radiocarbon collection published online had already been integrated into this database, thus not requiring their manual integration”.
Johannsen et al. (2024) applied the now well-established ‘dates as data’ methodology for modelling palaeodemography to the Neolithic of Southern Scandinavia, using just over 2000 dates from XRONOS and the regional literature. Their study further charted a previously-known population ‘boom’ that occurred in Southern Scandinavia before c. 2100 BCE, showing how individual subregions then departed from the regional trend, indicating hitherto unknown patterns of internal migration.
XRONOS is also integrated into a number of new and upcoming research projects. In her SNF-funded project RISE – Climate Change Resilience and Vulnerabilities of Bronze Age Waterfront Communities (2200-800 BC), Caroline Heitz (University of Bern) and her team are integrating radiocarbon dates from XRONOS with newly-compiled high resolution dendrochronological data to track the rise and fall of the famous lakeshore settlements around the Alps (sometimes called ‘pile dwellings’) in the Bronze Age. As part of the Ancient Environmental Genomics Initiative for Sustainability, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and Wellcome Trust, Tobias Richter and Joe Roe (University of Copenhagen) will be using XRONOS to improve the chronology of the emergence of the first agro-ecosystems of West Asia. Finally, Martin Hinz has won an ERC Consolidator Grant to use XRONOS’ unique global database and newly-developed Bayesian modelling methods to reconstruct prehistoric population sizes across Eurasia; his project ESTER – Estimating the Earth’s prehistoric population based on a large number of Records will launch at the University of Kiel in September 2025.
More information on research using XRONOS.