Shoreline Dating Paper

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1. Introduction
Shoreline dating is the method of using the correlation between sea levels from the past to place constraints on the dates of rock art in coastal environments. We show that by using various methods to map paleoshorelines in Scandinavia we can determine an absolute upper limit for some rock art sites whereas in others it is not applicable and other methods must be used. By assuming rock art was created on the shoreline in conjunction with style comparisons to other sites we can place relative dates on some sites.

2. The focus on shorelines – why they are important
It has been suggested (Erlandson, 2001; Bailey and Milner, 2002) that a greater focus on coastlines and the human dependence on marine resources in the past would …show more content…

Problems with shoreline dating
Shoreline dating has two major issues, geological constraints and the assumption that rock art was created on the shoreline, and if so how long after its emergence from the water. The latter is hard to constrain but using archaeological techniques we can reduce the uncertainty, however the former is directly supported by the resolution level of detail of current geophysical and dating methods.
A detailed study of the geological history, settings and effects on shoreline dating methods is beyond the scope of this paper however the importance of this must not be overlooked. A brief summary of the geological constraints is as follows. The reliance on C14 dating and the levels of certainty surrounding the resulting dates are well known and will not be elaborated upon. The effect of this is the precision of the data within the timescale of human development in …show more content…

However there are a few issues with the precision of the data. As shown in Figure 1. the resolution of the data is fairly coarse and lack of data is an issue as many curves rely on only a few dates, this issue is compounded by large areas of Scandinavian coastline for which no relevant data exists. Some work has been done with computer models to account for this however the acquisition of more dates would help limit the error propagated by the small datasets. Figure 1. Shoreline displacement curves from southern Norway in the vicinity of Borre. Solid lines indicate shoreline displacement curves based on calibrated radiocarbon ages, while dashed lines are based on uncalibrated radiocarbon ages. In the period of the utilisation of Borre between 600 and 1000 AD (Østigård and Gansum, 2009), the local sea-level there was about 3.5-5 m higher than today. For comparison the global sea-level curve for the last 6000 years indicates only a small contribution to the local sea-level change at Borre. Taken directly from (Draganits et al., 2015)

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