Dirk Seidensticker, Wannes Hubau & Katharina V. M. Jungnickel
The archive for radiocarbon datings from Central Africa (aDRAC) provides a catalogue of available radiocarbon dates from Central Africa. The data cover published radiocarbon dates and essential metadata for each date as well as available references.
The data cover 2197 radiocarbon dates from 664 sites:
Dates are available for the past up to 40.000 years, but the bulk of dates fall into the last three millennia:
Radiocarbon dates are reported since the 1960s and the record has increased steadily since then (newly added dates in red):
The bulk of available dates have been produced before the advent of AMS dating. Be aware, the archive contains also a small quantity of TL dates:
The aDRAC-Webapp will help you to explore the dataset.
The main dataset is to be found within /data/adrac.csv The csv-file is
encoded in ‘UTF-8’. Geocoordinates are storred as longitude (LONG) and
latitude (LAT).
| Datafield | Description |
|---|---|
| LABNR | Laboratory number; all spaces where changed/unified to dashes |
| C14AGE | Carbon-14 Age |
| C14STD | Standard deviation |
| C13 | Carbon-13 amount |
| METHOD | Dating method (convention, bulk, AMS) |
| MATERIAL | Dated Material |
| COUNTRY | ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 three-letter country code |
| SITE | Name of the Site |
| FEATURE | Designation of the Feature |
| FEATURE_DESC | Category of the Feature |
| DEPTH | Depth below surface in meters. In case that the original source only gave a range, then the mean depth has been recorded. |
| LAT | Latitude as decimal degrees |
| LONG | Longitude as decimal degrees |
| PHASE | General chronological phase (Attention gives no allocation to associated finds or representativeness) |
| LITHICS | Associated lithic finds |
| POTTERY | Associated pottery with name of the styl. Multiple style groups associated with the same date are separated by semicolon, synonym styles are separated by dash with the more specific/recent name first. Styles in parantheses (e.g. (Imbonga)) mean that pottery of that style was found in association with this date, but that based on the discussion in the literature, the date is not representing the age of this pottery. indet mean up to now not sufficiently described pottery was found in association with this date |
| IRON | Associated iron finds |
| FRUIT | Associated fruit remains (Eg: Elaeis guineensis; Cs: Canarium schweinfurthii; Ce: Coula edulis) |
| ZOO | Associated archaeozoological remains |
| CLASS* | Classification of reliability following Seidensticker et al. 2021 (table S1) |
| REMARK | Additional remarks |
| SOURCES | Source |
The literature used to compile the dataset is to be found within the
SOURCES.md file.
Classification of 14C dates based on quality screening and archeological association (cf. Seidensticker et al. 2021)
| CLASS | Archeological association |
|---|---|
| I: Relevant dates | |
| Ia | strong archaeological context |
| Ib | moderately strong archaeological context |
| Ic | weak archaeological context |
| Id | proxy for human activity but no artefacts |
| II: Irrelevant dates | |
| IIa | compromised archaeological link (e.g. post-depositional mixing) |
| IIb | lacking archaeological context |
| III: Unreliable dates | |
| IIIa | presumed lab error |
| IIIb | based on lacustrine carbonates (potential old-carbon effect) |
| IIIc | based on sedimentary bulk organic matter (potential old-carbon effect) |
All geo-coordinates included within aDRAC are either obtained from the published sources that contained the radiocarbon dates itself or were derived by searching for the name of the site in geonames.org. If published the coordinates were converted into WGS84 (EPSG:4326). Coordinates are rounded to three degrees, giving a rough precision of about 100m.
The data are accessible through the
c14bazAAR of Clemens
Schmid et al. through a custom module
(c14bazAAR::get_c14data("adrac")).
The aDRAC-dataset is made available under the Open Database License. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License.
Seidensticker, D. & W. Hubau (2021), ‘aDRAC. Archive des datations radiocarbones d’Afrique centrale’, Version 2.0 https://github.com/dirkseidensticker/aDRAC.
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Seidensticker, D., W. Hubau, D. Verschuren, C. Fortes-Lima, P. de Maret, C.M. Schlebusch & K. Bostoen. 2021. Population Collapse in Congo Rainforest from AD 400 Urges Reassessment of the Bantu Expansion. Science Advances.
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Power, R.C., T. Güldemann, A. Crowther & N. Boivin. 2019. Asian Crop Dispersal in Africa and Late Holocene Human Adaptation to Tropical Environments. Journal of World Prehistory. http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10963-019-09136-x. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-019-09136-x.