What are the material/contextual clues archeologists and historians have used to place the Hittites on the BCE timeline of history?
Is it primarily carbon dating?
Finding similar pottery styles from a known timeline? (If so, what is the basis for that timeline?)
Documents referencing foreign rulers with known dates? (If so, what is the basis for those dates)
I’m deeply interested in historical synthesis, and have found the timeline of the Hittites to be extremely hard to synthesize with the timelines of other nations supposedly coexisting with them. Our Egyptian timeline also seems to have immense issue with accuracy, which is what originally got me interested in historical synthesis, and now I’m finding the same sorts of problems for our timeline of the Hittites.
Can anyone point me to some authoritative sources that provide the deeper underpinnings of the dating methodology used for the late second millennium BCE?
Hittite chronology is still a matter of dispute, and for absolute chronology we are almost entirely dependent on linking events like the battle of Kadesh to Egyptian and Babylonian dates. It is exceedingly rare for Hittite historical texts to include dates, and even the calendrical system is not well understood aside from the names of the seasons.
I recently wrote about Hittite chronology in Who ruled when? Reconstructing a relative chronology of Bronze Age rulers. The post focuses primarily on relative chronology, but a couple of my responses to follow-up questions touch on the absolute chronology of the Late Bronze Age.