Institute of Prehistory, Early History and Medieval Archaeology

History of the Radiocarbon chronology of the Early Neolithic in central and southeastern Europe

Bernhard Weninger

Looking back into the now ca. 60 year history of 14C-referenced European Neolithic chronology we can recognise, in a variety of details, how creative, talented, often quarrelsome, yet imaginative many of the participating scientists have been, also in producing chronological results that we know today are often simply wrong. This applies similarly to the favourite example of the Radiocarbon Community, namely to unseriously discredit archaeological dating methods (in comparison to achieved ‘revolutions’ in 14C-dating) by re-iterating the existence of some indeed false (by 1000 yrs) pottery synchronisms, that occur on transfer of the Egyptian historical  chronology  into SE-Europe. Such errors in pottery dating are indeed manifest, but it questionable whether they are sufficiently explained by the existence of a pottery-synchronistic ‘fault line’ in the Balkans, as (supposedly) proposed by Colin Renfrew. The necessity of deconstruction of such popular narratives applies similarly to the faulty (often too smooth) construction of the ‘internationally recommended’ tree-ring-based 14C-age calibration curves used in the development of 14C-based Neolithic chronologies. This specific point will be exemplified for the LBK, simultaneously in historical and methodological perspective. In conclusion, the 60-year historical development of Neolithic 14C-chronology is more accurately described, in many aspects, neither by Popperian concepts of falsification/verification, nor by Kuhnian concepts of successive switches between ‘normal science’ and ‘revolutions’, but quite unpretentiously because the participating communities and research networks (Radiocarbon, Archaeology, European Languages) have been (and still are) operating ‘out-of-phase’ with each other on decadel scales.