[Verginius Rufus]

There is a famous 2nd-millennium BC site on Thera which was excavated in the period after WWII. There are famous frescoes from the buildings there now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. It was covered by volcanic ash (like Pompeii). Some of the ash landed on Greenland and back in the 1980s someone calculated from Greenland ice cores that the ash dated to 1628 B.C. I think there is some quibbling about the exact date but definitely there was an eruption during the Bronze Age. Classical Greek historians are not reliable about what happened 1000 years earlier.

I don't know if we have any evidence for what language was spoken by the people on Thera before the eruption.

[SunkenCiv]

Some of the ash landed on Greenland and back in the 1980s someone calculated from Greenland ice cores that the ash dated to 1628 B.C. I think there is some quibbling about the exact date but definitely there was an eruption during the Bronze Age.

There's a topic about those Greenland ice cores, in short, there's no trace of Thera in there, the deposits are possibly from Aniakchak (erupted in Alaska). There's also no trace of a match for a mid-2nd millennium "super-eruption" in any of the other proxy sources. The Thera supereruption just simply didn't happen.

Even when, during the respective Thera Conferences, individual scientists had pointed out that the magnitude and significance of the Thera eruption must be estimated as less than previously thought, the conferences acted to strengthen the original hypothesis. The individual experts believed that the arguments advanced by their colleagues were sound, and that the facts of a natural catastrophe were not in doubt... All three factors reflect a fantasy world rather than cool detachment, which is why it so difficult to refute the theory with rational arguments.

Eberhard Zangger, "The Future of the Past: Archaeology in the 21st Century", pp 49-50.