The social organization of prehistoric British societies has been a busy interest recently, with the hypothesis that the Neolithic was characterized by lineage societies, very likely egalitarian in character, whose dead were placed into communal ‘tombs for the ancestors’. But how secure is the evidence for burial in chambered or unchambered long barrows over many generations? Hazleton provides the key example, for it is the first neolithic burial-site to benefit from the full resources of AMS dating and the new calibration.

Radiocarbon dating began in archaeology with ancient Egypt, for it was to the securely dated materials from Egypt that Willard Libby naturally turned when his new radiocarbon method needed verification from reliable historical sources. With this paper the reverse process begins: verifying and correcting the conventional chronology for Egypt and neighbouring regions by calibrated radiocarbon.

This paper compares calibrated radiocarbon dates against historical dates in a manner not well covered by ANTIQUITY's usual convention. So in this paper only uncalibrated radiocarbon dates are denoted by ‘b.p.’, historical dates are denoted by ‘BC’, and calibrated radiocarbon dates by ‘Cal BC’ or simply ‘BC’ when the meaning is clear from the context.

Preceding papers in this section have underlined how much more there is to effective use of radiocarbon dating than the taking of some samples, their running in a laboratory, and the calibration of the individual dates that result. Here is a summary of where we are and where we may, with calibration, be going.

The Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit came into operation during 1983, at about the same time as the sister machine at the University of Arizona, Tucson. A conference in October 1985 explored its first two years' work; a review of that conference's proceedings is the occasion to see how much momentum AMS dating is generating.