Bayesian construction of radiocarbon calibration curves

In the early days of radiocarbon dating an assumption was made that the proportion of radioactive carbon in the earth's atmosphere has remained constant over time. It turns out, however, that there have been quite considerable and non-monotonic fluctuations in the levels of radiocarbon in the earth's atmosphere over time and so a calibration curve is needed to map from one scale to the other. Dr Buck was the invited statistician on the team that devised the 2004 internationally agreed estimates of the radiocarbon calibration curves.

In this seminar, she will talk about the nature of the data and the statistical and practical issues involved in creating a calibration curve from them. She will then describe the Bayesian methodology developed (jointly with Paul Blackwell) which, for the first time, makes due allowance for the complicated, two-dimensional errors and dependencies in the underlying data.