Hi everybody, from Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.

Thanks for joining me.

One of the things that's really fascinated me since I started this series on prehistory

and now the early historic period is how we know what we know, what the evidence is,

how we interpret it, and what gets lost or confused in the process of trying to turn

the interpretation of evidence into a comprehensive story about the human past.

To tell a comprehensive story that includes things like causality or why things happen,

we really need to know when they happen.

This is actually an incredibly difficult thing to figure out, particularly the further

we go back in time.

But today we've got a fantastic guest who can help us better understand this complicated

and essential field.

He's a distinguished professor of arts and sciences in classics working on classical

archaeology at Cornell University and director of the Cornell Tree Ring Laboratory and one

of the world's leading experts in archaeological science, especially radiocarbon dating and

dendro chronology.

He's also an exceptionally wide ranging and productive scholar with specialties in the archaeology

of the ancient Ejean, paleoclimate and state formation, all of which we'll try to touch

on here today.

Professor Start Manning, thank you so much for joining me.

Pleasure to be with you.

So let's start with chronology, when we're trying to understand when something happened,

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