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Settlement history is an interdisciplinary topic which connects history, archaeology, paleoecology, historical geography and other scientific disciplines. In Central Europe, one of important questions regards the dating of origin of medieval settlements. In 2020, our team published a study comparing the dating obtained from medieval written records with archaeological data (Fanta et al., 2020). Recently, Kolář and Szabó (2021) wrote a comment in which they criticised several aspects of our original study. They also suggested a new interpretation of our data based on their own reanalysis, the results of which are strikingly different from ours. We admit that many remarks raised by our colleagues are relevant and meaningful (filtering and selection of archaeological data, pottery chronology); that said, we believe that most of them have a negligible effect on the main results of our study. The reanalysis of our data by Kolář and Szabó is, however, fundamentally flawed. Their conclusion that "time lag between historical and archaeological dating can increase with time" has no backing in data; it is a mere statistical artifact produced by using inappropriate calculations and misinterpreting the results. In conclusion: A careful and correct analysis of our data indicates that the systematic upward bias in dating based on written sources is larger for earlier settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In various research fields, from archaeology to landscape history and ecology, it is important to know the date of the origin of historical settlements (i.e. towns, villages, hamlets, isolated farms) as precisely as possible. In Central Europe, there are two primary ways to obtain the date when a settlement was founded: "historical dating" (based on historical written sources) and "archaeological dating" (based on archaeological findings). Historical dating usually does not reflect the real time of origin, since the first reference to a settlement in written sources can be recorded many years after the real origin of the settlement. However, the time lag is unknown. Until now, no study has attempted to show exactly how the time lag differs in different centuries, or whether the time lag has been affected by any geographical factors. This paper compares the dates of origin from archaeological data and from written sources of medieval and early modern settlements (n = 527, AD 850–1600) in the present-day Czech Republic. We also tested the influence of local environmental conditions on the time lag. Our comparison shows that the time lag has been decreasing with the passing of calendar years (from a time lag of 250 years for AD 1000 to approx. 80 years for AD 1400). Towns and places close to major towns also have a shorter time lag in their historical dating (the difference is almost 100 years). These results make an interpretation of the historical dating of medieval towns and villages more complicated. The length of the time lag and its dispersion means that, for the purposes of settlement dating, historical dating needs to be combined with other dating methods (especially in the medieval period). Our results also identify a possible bias in the chronology of landscape transformation. • Written sources are not reliable for dating medieval settlements in Central Europe. • We have assessed the concordance between written sources and archaeological data. • The usual time lag in written sources decreases with increasing calendar year. • Around AD 1200, the typical time lag of written sources is 150 years. • Around AD 1600, written sources agree with archaeological data in 70% of the cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]