New date range for historic Thera eruption

Sep. 21 () –

The historic catastrophic eruption of Thera in the Aegean has been time-adjusted to between 1609 and 1560 BC, following state-of-the-art statistical analysis of the available data.

One of the largest volcanic eruptions of the Holocene epoch, measured by the volume of material ejected, It happened on the Greek island of Santorini, traditionally known as Thera. It is considered a pivotal event in the prehistory of the Aegean region and the Eastern Mediterranean, with the city of Akrotiri, buried some 1,600 years before Pompeii, becoming one of the key archaeological sites of the second millennium BC.

Archaeologists in the early 20th century postulated that the volcano erupted around 1500 BC. C., during the period of the Egyptian New Kingdom, and created a history around this assumption. But beginning in the 1970s, advances in radiocarbon dating have thrown that timeline into chaosand many experts insist that the eruption occurred about 100 years earlier.

The dates established in the new job –published in PLOS ONE– by Sturt Manning, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Classical Archeology at Cornell University, coincide with the Second Intermediate Period of Egypt, when the Hyksos, a dynasty of Canaanite origin, controlled Lower Egypt. While not yet a precise date, of year, to settle the general question of the correct historical period, The finding clears up many years of debate.

“This has been the most controversial date in the history of the Mediterranean for over 40 years,” he said. it’s a statement Manning, who heads Cornell’s Tree Ring Laboratory. “It’s been one of those endless disputes, to the point where people just say, ‘here’s a problem, we can’t solve it, let’s move on.’ I hope with this document people suddenly say, ‘You know what? Actually, this limits and defines the problem in a way that we have never been able to do before, and reduces it to where we can usefully say it is in the Second Intermediate Period. So we should start writing a different story.

For Manning, the Thera eruption has been like Mount Everest, a challenge he has wanted to tackle since the beginning of his career. Precise event dating has become more feasible in recent years with the increased sophistication of Bayesian statistical analysis, enabling chronological modeling that can integrate massive amounts of data and archaeological observations. to better define the probability parameters of an unknown event.

The parameters have been fairly well understood for years, Manning said, thanks to the extensive geological and archaeological research that has been carried out. The missing piece of the puzzle has been the often raised concern that volcanic carbon dioxide emissions they could have contaminated organic samples from Thera and caused incorrect age assessments.

Last spring, Manning realized he could solve the problem by looking elsewhere, hundreds of miles from Thera, in regions of the Aegean Sea that experienced the effects of the tsunami caused by the eruption. Manning incorporated the dates obtained for these episodes into her model to test and rule out the volcanic carbon dioxide warning. At Thera itself, she also detected the importance of a short but clearly observed interval of time between the abandonment of the city at Akrotiri and the great eruption, and incorporated this previously overlooked constraint into the modeling.

“For years it has been noted that there is a brief gap in the archaeological sequence between the time the city of Akrotiri was abandoned by its human population and before its burial under meters of pumice from the eruption. Although several hectares have been excavated No human skeletons have been found, so clearly people had a warning of imminent danger and left. No one has allowed that in the past,” Manning said. “By putting in that extra rating, we adjusted the statistical analysis.”

The model identified the most likely date range for the eruption: between about 1609 and 1560 BC. C. (95.4% probability), or approximately between 1606 and 1589 a. C. (68.3% probability).

The new timeline synchronizes the civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean and it also rules out several secondary theories, such as the idea that the Thera eruption was responsible for the destruction of the Minoan palaces on the Cretan coast, as proposed by Akrotiri’s first excavator, Spyridon Marinatos, in 1939.

“That doesn’t seem to be the case,” Manning said. “Because when we date the levels of destruction on Crete, they appear to be more than a century later.”

Because his analysis establishes that Thera’s eruption was earlier than the original proposed date, but not as early as radiocarbon dating initially suggested, Manning hopes the new timeline more palatable to experts on both sides of the debate.