datierende

Datierende is the present participle of the German verb datieren, used as an attributive adjective meaning dating or dating-related. In scholarly contexts it refers to the practice of determining the age of objects, samples, or events and to the methods applied to establish that age. The term is commonly used in fields such as archaeology, geology, paleontology, and art history, where establishing a temporal frame is essential.

Dating methods are typically divided into absolute dating and relative dating. Absolute dating aims to determine a calendar age or a time interval with a quantified estimate, using techniques such as radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology, thermoluminescence, uranium-series dating, and argon–argon dating. Relative dating establishes the sequence of events or objects without providing a precise numerical age, using methods like stratigraphy, biostratigraphy, magnetostratigraphy, and cross-dating.

The noun form of the concept is Datierung, referring to the process or result of assigning ages. Datierende methods can also be described as dating methods or age-determination techniques. In practice, dating results come with uncertainties and often require calibration, contextual information, and multiple methods to obtain robust age estimates. The term datierende is primarily used in German-language scholarly writing to specify methods or studies involved in determining temporal information. See also Datierung, Altersbestimmung, Radiokarbon-Datierung, Dendrochronologie.