New radiocarbon calibration software

Abstract

We have developed a software utility, "DateLab", for conventional radiocarbon age (CRA) calibration and Bayesian analysis of CRAs. The current version has a smaller range of applicability than other similar utilities such as Bcal, Oxcal, and Mexcal. However, it enables analysis of some common types of CRA datesets. The main advantages of DateLab are its high quality sampling algorithm, the possibility of carrying out model comparison and hypothesis testing in a straight-forward way, and the unbiased character of the summary statistics on which the analysis depends.