Archaeologists rarely discover the first or last known occurrences of past cultural phenomena, yet ‘start’ and ‘end’ dates are central to our understanding of past human behaviour; therein lays a paradox long known within the discipline. Optimal linear estimation (OLE) has recently been used to reconstruct the full temporal range of prehistoric archaeological technologies using only the partial records available. That is, OLE has been used to reconstruct the portions of the archaeological record not yet evidenced through artefact discoveries. Here we present OLE to a wider archaeological audience and outline for the first time the model's assumptions as they pertain to archaeological phenomena. We demonstrate OLE to be an accessible, user-friendly and methodologically transparent temporal range estimation method applied via a single set of equations. Further, we present five additional frequentist techniques that enable archaeologists to account for observation reliability, search effort and extreme data scarcity when inferring temporal ranges. These methods allow archaeologists to gain a more accurate understanding of the temporal range of past human behaviour.

考古学家很少发现过去文化现象的第一次或最后一次已知事件，但“开始”和“结束”日期是我们理解过去人类行为的核心；其中存在一个在该学科中早已为人所知的悖论。最优线性估计 (OLE) 最近已被用于仅使用部分可用记录来重建史前考古技术的完整时间范围。也就是说，OLE 已被用于重建尚未通过人工制品发现证明的考古记录部分。在这里，我们向更广泛的考古观众展示了 OLE，并首次概述了该模型与考古现象有关的假设。我们证明 OLE 是一个可访问的，通过一组方程应用的用户友好且方法上透明的时间范围估计方法。此外，我们还提出了五种额外的频率论技术，使考古学家能够在推断时间范围时考虑观察可靠性、搜索工作量和极端数据稀缺性。这些方法使考古学家能够更准确地了解过去人类行为的时间范围。