Radiocarbon dates for flint mines

The following list of radiocarbon dates for prehistoric flint mines in southern England and in Europe (TABLE 1) has been compiled mainly from dates published in the journal Radiocarbon but also includes a number of dates published by Sieveking et al. in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, Volume 39 (1973) and some others (Appendix to the Table) which have not yet appeared in Radiocarbon. A brief explanation of how the dates were recovered from Radiocarbon is necessary in order to indicate possible shortcomings the list as a whole may have. As there are now some 39,000 published radiocarbon dates a direct search through Radiocarbon for particular classes of dates would generally be impractical and manual needle-sorting of the ‘Radiocarbon Dates’ edge-punched cards1 would be almost as difficult a task.