rcarbon {rcarbon}

rcarbon:Calibration and analysis of radiocarbon dates

Description

The rcarbon package handles the calibration and analysis of radiocarbon, often but not exclusively for the purposes of archaeological research. It includes functions not only for basic calibration, uncalibration and plotting of one or more dates, but also a statistical framework for building demographic and related longitudinal inferences from aggregate radiocarbon date lists.

Details

Core functions in the rcarbon package can be grouped as follows:

Calibration Functions

calibrate and uncalibrate enable the calibration and back-calibration for a variety of curves.

Aggregation Functions

spd generates a summed probability distribution (SPD) of radiocarbon dates; binPrep can be used to define clusters of radiocarbon dates associated with the same context/phase

Statistical Test Functions

modelTest compares the observed SPD against a variety of theoretical models (most typically an exponential curve) using the Monte-Carlo approach; p2pTest compares observed differences in SPD between two user-specified points in time against differences expected from a theoretical model; permTest compares two or more SPDs and test for the null hypothesis that all sets are derived from the same population; sptest identifies, for defined intervals, locations with significantly higher or lower growth rate in the SPD compared to the pan-regional trend in the data

Note

Up-to-date development version, bug-reports, and further information concerning the rcarbon package can be found on GitHub (https://github.com/ahb108/rcarbon). To see the preferred citation for the package, type citation("rcarbon").

Author(s)

The rcarbon is developed and maintained by Andrew Bevan and Enrico Crema

References

See individual functions for references.