Post #2934464
2026-03-12 08:07 UTC
@steko@scholar.social Indeed! rcarbon and other radiocarbon packages use plain vectors to represent ages, which to be fair works fine in a weakly typed language like R. I wrote era because I wanted a more formal representation for c14 (https://c14.joeroe.io), which is to my knowledge the only package using it.
Subsequently @nfrerebeau@archaeo.social developed aion (https://packages.tesselle.org/aion/) which uses a similar approach but using days as the unit of measurement instead of years. This is used in his tesselle package suite.
Replies (1)
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@joeroe@archaeo.social 2026-03-12 08:10
@steko@scholar.social @nfrerebeau@archaeo.social In general R has broad support for calendars but the focus is just that, _calendars_. But these are far too precise for analyses based on longer (archaeological/geological) timescales where e.g. the day difference between Julian and Gregorian is not something you need to worry about! I think it is also useful to distinguish theoretically between calendars, which are a system for describing discrete spans of time, and what I call time scales — measurements of time elapsed.