Researchers at the University of Bristol have developed a new technique for the radiocarbon dating of pottery, it was announced yesterday. The technique has been used on a collection of Early Neolithic pottery excavated by archaeologists in Shoreditch in London, dating the fragments to a window of 138 years around 3600 BC. One of the researchers described the newly dated collection as ‘the strongest evidence yet that people in the area later occupied by the city were living a less mobile, farming-based lifestyle during the Early Neolithic period’.