A disastrous date

Abstract

Paolo Cherubini and colleagues have demonstrated convincingly that the identification of olive wood tree-rings from Santorini is ‘practically impossible’. Thus, the single piece of evidence that might have persuaded some archaeologists to support the ‘high’ 1613±13 BC date for the Theran eruption is hors de combat. The Theran olive-tree branch has gone the way of the Greenland Ice Core results of similar date and which enjoyed a similar devoted following until shown to be from a different eruption. Taken with Malcolm Wiener's explicit exposé of the myriad shortcomings of 14C dating, especially for this time period and event, these results take us back to where we were before the ‘radiocarbon revolution‘, when the largest Holocene eruption in the ancient world happened as Minoan Crete enjoyed wideranging influence, perhaps even control, over the Aegean, when Late Minoan IA pottery styles proliferated, and Egypt was in the early stages of its New Kingdom period (Wiener 2012, 2013).