Dates

[Andy Waddington on Cave Surveying]

On Wednesday 2003-12-10 17:28, Olly Betts typed:
> What I've seen so far suggests that most software opts for the day,
> month, and year (and so implicitly is limited to 1AD onwards).  That's
> unlikely to be a problem with the date of a survey, but it's not much
> use for date tagging of archeological data - a carbon dated find could
> be over 30000 years old.  I doubt you'd want day or month for dates that
> long ago, but a unified date scheme of some sort seems worth at least
> investigating.

Does ISO 8601 say anything about such dates, or is it purely an international
standard for the representation of contemporary dates ?

Although how the hell anyone is going to adopt a standard if it is only 
available (at ridiculous expense) on paper beats me :-(

Andy