Working with dates before 4713 BC

Hi all,

I am building an application which requires the storage of dates relating to the creation of archaeological items. The problem I am facing is that although most of the dates are working fine, some of the items were created before the beginning of recorded history (4713 BC).

Does anyone have any suggestions for making these dates play nicely with items created more recently (January 10^th, 1968 for example)? My only other requirement is that I need to be able to execute SQL queries which can find items made before a certain date, after a certain date, or between two dates.

Cheers,

Ryan