Greek Bronze Age ended 100 years earlier than thought, new evidence suggests

University of Birmingham via EurekAlert! ^ | October 9, 2014 | Stuart Gillespie

[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.

[SunkenCiv]

Some of the supereruption zealots claimed to have found traces of the Thera eruption in three separate ice cores from Greenland, but that all of them were nearly a century older (which should have red-flagged their attention, but again, they were supereruption zealots). And the ice core evidence matches Aniakchak, an Alaskan volcano.

http://www.informath.org/apprise/a4128/b42008.pdf

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1623102/replies?c=12

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3058727/posts?page=2#2

[Bigg Red]

Okay, thank you for the lesson. I learn so much from your posts.