As the use of large-scale radiocarbon datasets becomes more common and applications of Bayesian chronological modeling become a standard aspect of archaeological practice, it is imperative that we grow a community of both effective users and consumers. Indeed, research proposals and publications now routinely employ Bayesian chronological modeling to estimate age ranges such as statistically informed starts, ends, and spans of archaeological phenomena. Although advances in interpretive techniques have been widely adopted, sampling strategies and determinations of appropriate sample sizes for radiocarbon data remain generally underdeveloped. As chronological models are only as robust as the information we feed into them, formal approaches to assessing the validity of model criteria and the appropriate number of radiocarbon dates deserve attention. In this article, through a series of commonly encountered scenarios, we present easy-to-follow instructions for running simulations that should be used to inform the design and construction of chronological models.

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我需要多少日期？

随着大规模放射性碳数据集的使用变得越来越普遍，贝叶斯年代模型的应用成为考古实践的标准方面，我们必须发展一个由有效用户和消费者组成的社区。事实上，研究提案和出版物现在通常采用贝叶斯年代模型来估计年龄范围，例如统计上知情的考古现象的开始、结束和跨度。尽管解释技术的进步已被广泛采用，但放射性碳数据的采样策略和适当样本大小的确定仍然普遍不发达。由于年代模型仅与我们输入的信息一样强大，因此评估模型标准的有效性和适当数量的放射性碳日期的正式方法值得关注。