CAA SIG Chrono - Newsletter 1

Newsletter 1 – January 2026

Dear member of the CAA SIG Chrono,

We hope this message finds you well. We are glad to inaugurate the newsletter of our Special Interest Group (SIG) on chronological modelling – SIG Chrono – with this first issue.

Meetings & Events#

Next meeting: The next meeting – the third – of the SIG is scheduled for Monday 16 February, 10h-11h, CET. Details will follow.

Second meeting of the SIG:

The second online meeting of the SIG took place on 15 December. We were lucky to hear a presentation by Prof. Caitlin Buck and Dr Marta Krzyzanska on “Quantifying Uncertainty in Expert Archaeological Dating Evidence”, related to their QUEADE research project. The video of the lecture is available here.

First meeting of the SIG: The work of the SIG was kicked off with the first online meeting, which took place on October 27. We had a presentation about “A Computational Approach toward Minoan Chronology: Thoughts on the modelling aspects” by Martina Trognitz, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, and Iro Mathioudaki.

Conferences and workshops#

• Round table on chronological modelling at CAA 2026 (Session 35, chairs: T. Huet and E. Levy)
  • Topic 1: Epistemology of archaeological time [chair: Joan Anton Barcelo]
  • Topic 2: Archaeological time in practice: cross dating, anchor dates, cultural periods [chair: Keith May, James Taylor]
  • Topic 3: Formats, standards and interoperability [chair: Florian Thierry]
  • Topic 4: Mathematics, Algorithms and Software [chair: Joe Roe]
• Practical workshop on ChronoLog at CAA 2026 (by E. Levy)

Press review

As 2025 draws to a close, we would like to share some articles on chronological modelling published this year, which might be of interest to many of us. Do not hesitate to send us more references, that we can share in the next newsletter.

• Lee Lyman, R. (2025). On the origin, history, means of implementation and weaknesses of archaeological cross dating. North American Archaeologist, 46(4), 167-202. https://doi.org/10.1177/01976931251355249

• Koeser, R. S., Damerow, J., Casties, R., & Crawford, C. (2025). Undate: humanistic dates for computation: Because reality is frequently inaccurate. Computational Humanities Research, 1, e5. https://doi.org/10.1017/chr.2025.10006

• de Navascués, M., Burgarella, C., Jakobsson, M. Analysis of the abundance of radiocarbon samples as count data. Peer Community Journal, Volume 5 (2025), article no. e20. https://doi.org/10.24072/pcjournal.522

• Archaeometry Special Issue on chronological modelling (2024-2025): 10 contributions on chronological modelling.

SIG Practicalities#

Historical time: The “historical-time” GitHub organization hosts the repository of SIG Chrono. In the repository, we keep an archive of past meetings and newsletters. The repository serves as the backend of the SIG’s webpage were you will also find current information on upcoming meetings and further useful information (e.g. how to subscribe to the newsletter to become a member of this group).

Feel free to share this newsletter with any interested colleagues.

Best wishes to you all for 2026,

Eythan Levy, Martina Trognitz and Thomas Huet