 These dates are temporally consistent in that the shells composing the beachrock core from the Bimini Road dated older than the cement holding them together as beachrock.These dates can be interpreted as indicating that the shells composing the Bimini Road are, uncorrected for temporal and environmental variations in radiocarbon, about 3,500 years old.Because of time-averaging and other taphonomic factors, a random collection of shells likely would yield a radiocarbon date that is a few hundred years earlier than when the final accumulation of shells, which were cemented to form beachrock, actually occurred.