Santorini Eruption Radiocarbon Dated to 1627-1600 B.C.
Abstract
Precise and direct dating of the Minoan eruption of Santorini (Thera) in Greece, a global Bronze Age time marker, has been made possible by the unique find of an olive tree, buried alive in life position by the tephra (pumice and ashes) on Santorini. We applied so-called radiocarbon wiggle-matching to a carbon-14 sequence of tree-ring segments to constrain the eruption date to the range 1627‐1600 B.C. with 95.4% probability. Our result is in the range of previous, less precise, and less direct results of several scientific dating methods, but it is a century earlier than the date derived from traditional Egyptian chronologies.
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References
1
Materials and methods available as supporting material on Science Online.
2
C. G. Doumas, The Wall-Paintings of Thera (The Thera Foundation, Athens, 1992).
3
M. Bietak, Science Versus Archaeology: Problems and Consequences of High Aegean Chronology, in The Synchronization of Civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Second Millenium B.C., M. Bietak, Ed. (Vienna, 2003), pp. 23–33.
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S. W. Manning, A Test of Time: The Volcano of Thera and the Chronology and History of the Aegean and East Mediterranean in the Mid Second Millennium B.C. (Oxbow Books, Oxford, 1999).
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C. B. Ramsey, S. W. Manning, M. Galimberti, Radiocarbon46, 325 (2004).
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T. Pfeiffer, thesis, Aarhus University (2003).
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C. Bronk Ramsey, J. van der Plicht, B. Weninger, Radiocarbon43, 381 (2001).
8
We thank H. Jannopoulou-Akyla and G. Nomikos for providing recent olive material for comparison; I. Pfeifer-Schäller for providing the x-ray tomography imagery; S. Manning, A. McBirney, R. Wilson, and H. Loft Nielsen for comments; and G. Nielsen and M. Dybdahl for technical assistance.
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Published In
Science
Volume 312 | Issue 5773
28 April 2006
28 April 2006
Copyright
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 18 January 2006
Accepted: 23 March 2006
Published in print: 28 April 2006
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- Walter L. Friedrich et al.
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