An open-source toolkit for radiocarbon dating and calibration

The analysis and interpretation of radiocarbon dates can involve many steps, such as switching between units or time-scales, assessing the impacts of contamination, applying marine or other offsets, inspecting calibration curves, calibrating dates, extracting probabilities from calibrated distributions, and analysing and plotting multiple dates. Here, we present rice , a new open-source R package which, together with other packages such as rbacon , Bchron , coffee and clam , enables users to perform such calculations within R , thus allowing most of the steps from data entry to calibration, age-modeling and subsequent analysis and interpretation of time-series to be performed within a single widely-used, multi-platform, transparent and open-source software environment. All calculation steps are documented and can be inspected, and users can also write new/enhanced functions. The package could thus prove useful in both educational and research settings.