In recent years, it has become obvious that whenever possible it is better to have several ¹⁴C dates in order to ascertain the time period of a phenomenon. One arrives at populations of dates which would not normally be easily related to nor comparable with each other. A new method based on statistical and graphical evaluation of the dates is described here. Standard deviation is used to construct histograms corresponding to each date. These can be summed up in large histograms encompassing several dates and which are comparable with each other. The application of this method to 42 ¹⁴C dates from several Iron Age sites in West Central Africa has provided the clue for dating by an absolute chronology the first complete Iron Age sequence for this part of the world. -- AATA