Every time I read anything about ancient history or archaeology I really wish we'd adapt the #HoloceneCalendar.
This calendar starts (roughly) with the invention of farming and adds 10,000 to the Gregorian year, so that this year would be 12026.
Using it would avoid having to remember to count down for years in the BCE era and generally make dates in ancient history and most archeology less confusing.
A lot of times archaeologists use "BP" or "Before Present", so that all the years an artifact is discovered count down (instead of counting up like a normal calendar).
But this is also a bit confusing since the "present" is defined as 1950 and it is no longer 1950.
I think that's used as the epoch date for BP partly because of nuclear testing potentially messing up radioactive dating technology.
If we used the Holocene calendar, we'd still need a Pre-Holocene epoch for Paleolithic and Mesolithic archaeology, but there would at least be fewer cases where we have to count backwards.
And every written thing that we know about would be well within the Holocene epoch, so we wouldn't have to count backwards when dating history and literature.
I also think splitting the calendar between AD and BC gives an impression that everything before that point is completely different from everything after that point. But really, societies around the world were just ticking along, changing gradually over the 1BC to 1AD transition.
Centering that split only makes sense if you want to center Christianity in your timekeeping system for some reason. I don't care about doing that, and would rather have ancient timelines seem more sensible.
There are other proposals for like... adapting ancient Roman years but with modern year calculation to avoid the ancient timeline problem - but that seems harder than just slapping a "1" in the front of our dates and calling it done.
Also, we have a rough timeline for the start of agriculture around 12,000 years ago, along with other geological transitions, so that seems like a more pan-human thing to peg the timeline to than a particular culture's calendar.
Another option would be to just keep the current calendar for recent years, but adapt the Holocene Calendar whenever you have to write about ancient history or archaeology in the Holocene.
Like if you're just doing Ancient Roman history, you could write "The Romans destroyed Carthage in 9,852." or "Marcus Aurelius was Emperor in 10,161."
If you're doing something that straddles the line (say Byzantine history) then you can pick which calendar to use but Holocene might be the better choice.
Floaty Birb