Hi all,

With HERs we’re entering all dates as BC/AD, I wouldn’t like to confuse things further!

I think a start date of 850,000 BC sounds good..?

Helen Wells
Historic Environment Record Officer
Leicestershire County Council

Planning, Historic & Natural Environment, Leicestershire County Council, County Hall, Glenfield, Leics, LE3 8RA
Telephone: 0116 3058323 / E-mail: [log in to unmask]

Re comments about dates. The precise year for start end of a particular period is a bit notional for most of the Palaeolithic, since most of our dating is to the nearest few thousand years, if we are lucky. When we get to dealing with the Upper Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and later prehistory - Qs 1.3 onward - there is some discussion of calibrated, uncalibrated, calendar usage etc.

Sorry to interrupt, but before people start deliberating precise start and end dates for sub/periods, could we discuss how dates are recorded or expressed? Apologies that I am not on HER Forum so don’t know what has already been discussed/decided, but it is important that dates are presented in a consistent manner, and in a manner that can be reviewed (eg if radiocarbon calibration methods are altered or refined). For the early Holocene, dates are sometimes recorded as uncalibrated radiocarbon dates, as calibrated carbon dates, or as  baldly ‘BC’ etc. There is a major discrepancy between the methods of palaeoenvironmental specialists and archaeologists. Given the rapidity of climate changes towards the end of the Pleistocene/start of the Early Holocene (however defined) these disparities in expressions of dates causes much confusion. Along the lines of – well it was about 12,000 years but was that 12,000 years ago or 10,000 BC etc.

Bw

Sue

Dear Colleagues

Welcome on behalf of the FISH terminology Working Group to the Labels, Lithics and Landforms e-conference on controlled vocabularies for Palaeolithic and Mesolithic data

This conference came about as a result of recent Historic Environment Record (HER) enhancement projects funded under the National Heritage Protection Plan Activity 4G1: Pleistocene and Early Holocene Archaeology. Many of the issues involved were highlighted in a presentation by Francis Wenban-Smith at the Historic Environment Record (HER) Forum) in July 2014 with and by subsequent discussion on the HER forum mailing list.

The purpose of the conference is to discuss how Palaeolithic/Mesolithic information could be better indexed and described in research resources in light of recent advances in understanding of these periods and consider mechanisms for achieving this aim. In particular we will focus on the use of existing terminologies and the need for improvement and enhancement of thesauri and wordlists to better capture information about the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic in Britain.

There are 3 sessions covering different themes as follows:

THURSDAY 23rd October
1.) Chronology: 14.00-19.00

FRIDAY 24th October
2.) Landforms, sites and palaeoenvironmental information: 9.00-13.00
3.) Artefacts: 14.00-17.00

Could I ask participants if possible to include the session number and point they are addressing in the subject line of their emails (eg.session1: question 1) to help us keep track of the arguments being presented and help with producing summaries of each session.

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And last but not least thank you for joining us and enjoy the conference! 

Gill

Gill Campbell

Head of Environmental Studies

English Heritage

T: 02392 856780

English Heritage Science Network Convenor

www.english-heritage.org.uk

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