Assiros Toumba: the site and its location. The 14 m high tell is formed from the debris of an unbroken, thousand year long sequence of building levels dating between c 2000 and 1000 BC.
Posted on 10/17/2014 3:37:07 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Conventional estimates for the collapse of the Aegean civilization may be incorrect by up to a century, according to new radiocarbon analyses.
While historical chronologies traditionally place the end of the Greek Bronze Age at around 1025 BCE, this latest research suggests a date 70 to 100 years earlier.
Archaeologists from the University of Birmingham selected 60 samples of animal bones, plant remains and building timbers, excavated at Assiros in northern Greece, to be radiocarbon dated and correlated with 95.4% accuracy using Bayesian statistical methodology at the University of Oxford and the Akademie der Wissenschaften Heidelberg, Germany.
'Until very recently the chronology of the later part of the Greek Bronze Age was entirely based on historical dates derived from Egypt and the Near East with the aid of exported or imported objects such as Minoan or Mycenaean pottery or Egyptian scarabs...'
The dates derived from the samples meticulously excavated at Assiros – 25km from modern-day Thessaloniki – represent the most complete data set for the Greek Bronze Age, covering 400 years from the mid-14th century to the 10th century BCE. They tell a similar story to those determined for the volcanic eruption in Santorini (Thera), which has been re-dated from 1525 BCE to 1625 BCE as a result of scientific evidence.
(Excerpt) Read more at eurekalert.org ...
Assiros Toumba: the site and its location. The 14 m high tell is formed from the debris of an unbroken, thousand year long sequence of building levels dating between c 2000 and 1000 BC.
What a mess — there’s no way to date “the end of the Bronze Age” unless there’s some kind of final bronze workshop (and not just one, for that matter) which could then be RC dated. This headline and the claims in the paper are a nonsense, at best.
The RC dating of the site is worthwhile, assuming there are stratified artifacts sync’ing with, for example, other cultures and civilizations. Past practice, however, has been to attribute mistakes in the conventional pseudochronology to gerbils, family heirlooms, and copycat artists.
Without playing it as it tells the truth, this study will be another example of playing it as they lie.
mmm...
Isn’t this period usually called Mycenean? I thought Bronze Age Greece was the Classical Period.
I would think that the end of the Bronze age would be characterized by the first Iron mine and smithy.
The Testimony of Radiocarbon Dating
http://www.varchive.org/ce/tc14.htm
The Pitfalls of Radiocarbon Dating
http://www.varchive.org/ce/c14.htm
The division into stone-copper-bronze-iron is a just-so story from before scientific dating, and doesn’t have much bearing, not least because the availability of bronze came and went (probably for economic reasons or the access to raw materials or both), so the bronze age in parts of the world was still going on when Columbus liberated the New World.
Is there also a Greek Orthodox dating or a Protestant dating?
Actually, I recall hearing c. 1628 for the date of the eruption of Thera more than 25 years ago.
That is why the disappearance of bronze should not mark the end of the age. Rather the appearance of a new metal (iron) or rather the ability to obtain it in quantity and the ability to smelt ore into ingots and work iron ingots into tools, should mark the start of the new age.
The Mycenaean era is aka the age of heroes; it ended rather rapidly, and due to invasion in most places. The old Mycenaean sites were either abandoned, or the rebuilding went up immediately atop the ruins, without any stratification or break in the action.
In Mycenaean Sparta, there’s barely any known traces of what must have been a big palace, perhaps because the available hilltop wasn’t very large and had to be supplemented with landfill. The landfill eroded away, or was carried off for reuse when the “grandsons of Hercules” arrived, killed off the Mycenaean royal house, and began their implementation of their charming euthanasia and pederasty based freakshow.
In Pylos, which was the home of Nestor (sez the Iliad), the Mycenaean archive was found on day one when Blegen started his excavation; there’s one partial tablet that ends in a scrawl, as if the scribe suddenly had to join the defense of the unfortified city. Pylos’ location was remembered down through the ages, but never rebuilt. During one of their wars to enslave their neighbors, the classical era Spartans conquered the area, and eventually lost a land battle to the Athenians during the Pelop. war.
James, P., 2012. “Review Article: Tree-rings, Kings and Old World Archaeology and Environment” (185K), Palestine Exploration Quarterly 144:2, pp. 144-150
http://www.centuries.co.uk/kuniholmfestschrift.pdf
http://www.centuries.co.uk/replies.htm#internet
The 1628 BC date for Thera was arrived at less than ten years ago, and is based on a reckless disregard for Carbon-12 enrichment of both soils and artifacts made from plants and trees grown in those soils. The estimated date for the supposed supereruption was 1500 BC, and that was the estimate by no later than 1950 AD.
The supereruption has literally zero literary remains; from ancient sources written right on top of what should have been the action, we have no preserved legends whatsoever. In the 19th century, someone dreamed up the idea that there was an eruption there and that hypothetical event wound up associated with Plato’s Atlantis.
The pipsqueak island of Santorini has a submerged caldera with one side gone, but the age of the caldera is very much prehistoric (20K or older). The only eruption recorded from classical times works out to circa 200 BC. That’s all there is.
Definite dating of this tiem period is pretty tricky — but we CAN say that when it happened, the average world temperature was precisely 53.6 degrees (F).
No, that’s why the use of the terms Bronze Age and Iron Age should be tipped onto the refuse pile.
Iron implements, components, tools, and weapons have been showing up in very old contexts since the beginning of archaeology. Iron was used alongside bronze, but processing iron from ore was done by various means discovered independently by different cultures. Meteoritic iron (which is generally nearly pure iron) probably accounts for most or all the seemingly anachronistic finds.
Bronze continued in use from the so-called Bronze Age (which includes the Mycenaean era, when armor is described as being made out of bone, leather, and other materials) right up to the present day, essentially without a break.
LOL!
> Q12: Is there any truth in the rumour that scholars have fabricated or falsified evidence in order to disprove CoD?
http://www.centuries.co.uk/faq.htm#q12
...so the bronze age in parts of the world was still going on when Columbus liberated the New World.
(((
I guess they want us to believe that all civilizations progressed at exactly the same rates.
Back when it originated, the stone-copper-bronze-iron idea was an attempt to create a dating system, as no radiometric methods yet existed (sez here the originator died in 1865). The whole, when did the bronze age end / what led to the end of the bronze age, is a bogus debate and complete waste of time, as there wasn’t any such clear-cut division or abandonment of one for another. Stone continues to be used in a good many places, by small groups, and they’ve never used anything else, not even a Coke bottle dropped from an airliner. During the obsidian trade, which goes back thousands of years BC, the sophistication of its uses included attractive (and still usable) hand mirrors, as well as more familiar things like arrow- and spearheads.
Another thing that got dropped out is the use of ceramics. The use of fired ceramic implements (pots, jars, various decorative doodads, but no weapons that come to mind) really caught on in the eastern Med around 7000 years ago; in what is now China fired pottery goes back as far as 20,000 years ago; in Europe at Dolní Vestonice, fired pottery figurines (most of which appear to have been ritually smashed, perhaps some kind of hunting magic) date as far back as 29,000 years. That’s quite a range.
Preceramic sites are recognized by their complete lack of fired ceramics. Khirokitia in Cyprus is an example of a preceramic settlement; the settlers came from the mainland, as discerned by the animal remains in their rubbish, these include species they imported from there and which are not known from any other site on Cyprus.
They made that sea crossing 9,000 years ago. It used to be thought (not sure now) that their old neighbors on the mainland had started to fire their ceramics, and they wanted no more contact with them, a probably silly explanation. More likely they kept getting their asses handed to them by violent jackoffs and just fled.
I attended a seminar in 1987 where we were told that ash from Thera had been found in the Greenland ice cap and that the ice core yielded a date of 1628 B.C. (or perhaps it was “about 1625” and I got the 1628 date later). It wasn’t from carbon dating and it definitely was much longer than 10 years ago. I know they used to date the eruption rather later than that.
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