Humanities – Page 8 – Science Spot

Improvements in archaeological carbon dating techniques and the burnt remains of an old olive tree could lead to an explosive argument and the rewriting of the history books on the subject of the earliest Mediterranean civilizations – the Minoan, Greek, Cypriot, and Egyptian.

Sturt Manning of Cornell University and a visiting professor at Reading University together with Christopher Bronk Ramsey and Thomas Higham of Oxford University have obtained new evidence that the Aegean cultures may have emerged much earlier than scientists thought.

Sturt Manning

The researchers analysed 127 samples taken from sites in Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Turkey, and applied a new and improved version of carbon dating to show that, for instance, the major New Palace culture of Crete was contemporaneous with one in the Levant, not with the New Kingdom period of Egypt as had been inferred previously. The dating of ancient Egypt has long been thought to be known with a high degree of accuracy but the team’s new statistical approach to carbon dating provides 95% certainty for dating a piece of buried charcoal from more than 3,600 years ago to within a staggeringly precise range of 27 years, and the outcome of their work is dates which are at odds with the textbooks over a 300-year period, 1700-1400 BC.

Manning’s team created the largest set of focused radiocarbon data for such a problem, spanning a 300-year period. With this data they have suggested a new chronology for the Aegean late Bronze Age as occurring between 1700-1400 BC, some 100 years earlier than previous estimates.

Bronze age excavation

The research ties in coincidentally but perfectly, says Manning, with the work of a Danish and German team, headed by Walter Fredrich of the University of Aarhus, which has been studying this same period of Aegean history. They have used radiocarbon analysis to date the remains of an olive tree excavated from volcanic pumice on the island of Santorini. The results strongly corroborate the British team’s work.

Arrow marks the spot (Science/AAAS/Manning et al)

The two sets of findings mean a shift of the dates for the Aegean civilisation and its cultures – such as the buried town of Akrotiri on Santorini, the ‘Pompeii’ of the Aegean by about a century earlier.

“Our findings also imply that some previously hypothesized dates and associations for the Santorini eruption around 1650 or 1645 BC are now not so likely, says Manning, and new efforts need to be directed at the ice-core and tree-ring records if a specific date is to be achieved. He adds that the two studies have major ramifications for the archaeology, art-history, language history and other records of this region. “If the findings are accepted, he says, then the earlier chronology would frame a different context, and a longer era, for the very genesis of Western civilisation. The seventeenth century BC may become a very important period.

Category: Humanities

A carbon date with an ancient Greek

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