The Aotearoa/New Zealand Radiocarbon Database Upgrade

For the last 20 years, New Zealand researchers have had limited access to a large number of radiocarbon dates measured on archaeological materials. The most used resource containing this type of information, the NZ Radiocarbon Database (McFadgen et al. 2000), has not been updated since 2002, leaving researchers to create their own, often selective datasets for analysis (e.g., Bickler 2018a, 2019; Bickler et al. 2013; Brown 2014, Brown and Crema 2019, Wilmshurst et al. 2011). Consequently, many radiocarbon dates have fallen into obscurity. Here we introduce a new online geospatial database for NZ archaeological radiocarbon data that incorporates and adds to these older datasets. This project has identified over 5100 radiocarbon records associated with archaeological sites and artefacts, of which more than 4100, having met the minimum auditing requirements, are included in a new database release