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
- In RIA, a set of standards containing known concentrations of unlabelled analyte that are run alongside test samples. Bound radioactivity is measured...
- 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...