Sediment accumulation rates are an essential tool for understanding the processes related to the deposition of organic and inorganic materials in marine and lacustrine environments. These rates are a measure of the speed of deposition and also represent a tool for further paleoenvironmental reconstuctions of climate history or biotic evolution as seen in fossil records. This volume provides an introduction to available strategies for the determination of the speed of sedimentation. It discusses various methods and related problems, proposes fresh concepts and introduces selected applications in the form of case studies.