Terminus post quem (TPQ)
Definition
Latin for 'limit after which.' The date of the youngest datable item in a context sets the earliest possible date for the event that created or sealed that context. A coin minted in 1820 in a burial fill means the burial cannot be older than 1820.
Related terms
- AMS radiocarbon dating
- Accelerator Mass Spectrometry measurement of the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in a sample. It requires milligram-scale samples and produces a raw...
- Bomb-pulse dating
- Use of the post-1952 atmospheric 14C spike, produced by nuclear weapons testing, to date biological tissues formed since 1950. Because the spike...
- Calibration curve
- A plot of instrument response (peak area, absorbance, intensity) against analyte concentration, built from five to seven standards spanning the expected case...
- Dendrochronology
- The science of dating by tree-ring sequences. Each annual ring encodes the growing conditions of that year; matching ring patterns to a...
- OSL (Optically Stimulated Luminescence)
- A dating method that measures the accumulated radiation dose stored in mineral grains (usually quartz or feldspar) since they were last exposed...
Explained in
- Radiocarbon and Other Dating MethodsLatin for 'limit after which.' The date of the youngest datable item in a context sets the earliest possible date for the event that created or sealed that con...