My research focuses on the construction of precise chronologies for archaeological sites, environmental records, and aspects of material culture. I combine disparate strands of evidence – stratigraphy, typology, seriation, biological relationships, lithology, radiocarbon dates, coin dates, and many others – in formal, Bayesian statistical models.

Chronology is fundamental to our understanding of the past. In the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966, 258) in The Savage Mind, ‘there is no history without dates’. Fundamentally, the aim of my research is to rescue archaeology from the mire of fuzzy chronology to which visual inspection of calibrated radiocarbon dates consigns us, and to reclaim ‘time of the middling sort’ for our narratives of the past.

Archaeology is good at the long-term, indeed it has carved a niche within the academy as the discipline with a long reach back into time. Archaeology is also good at the short-term, at the few hours one afternoon when a person in the past sat by a fire and knapped out a flint tool. What Bayesian statistics give us is the human time in the middle – generations, lifetimes, ‘that time that granny told me about when she was a girl’ – and the ability to create narratives of people in the past.

I am currently actively involved in a number of major international research progammes:

• Çatalhöyük Research Project, Turkey (http://catalhoyuk.com/)
• International Radiocarbon Calibration (https://www.intcal.org/)
• Seascapes: tracing the emergence and spread of maritime networks in the Central and Western Mediterranean in the 3rd millennium BC (Seascapes (University of Bristol))