CAA SIG Chrono - Newsletter 2

Newsletter 2 – May 2026

Dear member of the CAA SIG Chrono,

We hope this message finds you well. We are glad to share the newsletter of our Special Interest Group (SIG) on chronological modelling – SIG Chrono. More information will follow.

Meetings & Events#

Next meeting: The next meeting of the SIG (4^th meeting) is scheduled for Tuesday 12 May, 18:00–19:00 CET, with a presentation by Ryan Shaw: “Standardizing infrastructure for temporal reasoning” (see the abstract) between 18:05–18:45 CET.

3rd meeting of the SIG:

The third online meeting of the SIG took place on 16 February. We were pleased to hear a presentation by Martin Hinz and Joe Roe entitled “Beyond the Grant: Our Roadmap for the XRONOS Radiocarbon Database”, related to their XRONOS database. The video of the lecture is available here, and the slides are available here.

@CAA26: the RT35 round table on chronological modelling

The 2-hour round table (RT) on chronological modelling (see description here) was an engaging moment of discussion. It provided insight into current practices among colleagues (with Excel appearing to be the most commonly used tool for structuring time-related data), as well as debates on theoretical approaches to time (physicist/probabilistic approaches vs. nominalist/cultural-historical approaches).

The “interactive” poster was also a valuable source of information on current practices and familiarity with chronological modelling (see its IIIF version below, zoomable):

The “interactive” poster, divided into four main questions, received around 90 contributions in the form of stickers and short post-it notes.

A poster contribution we particularly appreciated addressed the question “A ‘grand unified’ approach to chronology is…” (poster bottom-right). A post-it was placed at the intersection between “Desirable” and “Not feasible”, with the comment: “[A ‘grand unified’ approach to chronology is] A wet dream of nerdy archaeologists.”. There is still a lot of work to be done before we have a functional TIS (Temporal Information System).

RT35 organisers and session chairs, from left to right: Juan Anton Barceló (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Florian Thierry (LEIZA), Joe Roe (University of Copenhagen), Eythan Levy (University of Zurich), Thomas Huet (CNRS), and Keith May (Historic England).

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.

Thomas Huet, Eythan Levy and Martina Trognitz