century in date field?

I'm an historian with a pc-database background, new to the world of Oracle. It seems to me that the answer to this question should be easy, but I haven't found anything in the documentation...

Is it possible to alter the defaults and allow a date field to accept a date with the century (ie '14-JAN-1672') or must you make it a CHAR field and use the TO_DATE function each time that you want to do a calculation involving the date?

Thanks,

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| Jennifer Waywell                   |              

| Canadian Centre for Architecture   |               


| Montreal, Quebec                   |