Annual radiocarbon record indicates 16th century BCE date for the Thera eruption
Author
Pearson, Charlotte L.Brewer, Peter W.

Brown, David
Heaton, Timothy J.
Hodgins, Gregory W. L.
Jull, A. J. Timothy

Lange, Todd
Salzer, Matthew W.
Affiliation
Univ Arizona, Lab Tree Ring ResUniv Arizona, Sch Anthropol
Univ Arizona, Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Lab
Univ Arizona, Dept Geosci
Issue Date
2018-08
Metadata
Show full item recordPublisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCECitation
C. L. Pearson, P. W. Brewer, D. Brown, T. J. Heaton, G. W. L. Hodgins, A. J. T. Jull, T. Lange, M. W. Salzer, Annual radiocarbon record indicates 16th century BCE date for the Thera eruption. Sci. Adv. 4, eaar8241 (2018).Journal
SCIENCE ADVANCESRights
Copyright © 2018 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.Collection Information
This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at repository@u.library.arizona.edu.Abstract
The mid-second millennium BCE eruption of Thera (Santorini) offers a critically important marker horizon to synchronize archaeological chronologies of the Aegean, Egypt, and the Near East and to anchor paleoenvironmental records from ice cores, speleothems, and lake sediments. Precise and accurate dating for the event has been the subject of many decades of research. Using calendar-dated tree rings, we created an annual resolution radiocarbon time series 1700-1500 BCE to validate, improve, or more clearly define the limitations for radiocarbon calibration of materials from key eruption contexts. Results show an offset from the international radiocarbon calibration curve, which indicates a shift in the calibrated age range for Thera toward the 16th century BCE. This finding sheds new light on the long-running debate focused on a discrepancy between radiocarbon (late 17th-early 16th century BCE) and archaeological (mid 16th-early 15th century BCE) dating evidence for Thera.Note
Open access journal.ISSN
2375-2548PubMed ID
30116779Version
Final published versionSponsors
University of Arizona; Malcolm H. Wiener Foundation; Merops Foundation; European Union; State of Hungary; European Regional Development Fund [GINOP-2.3.2.-15-2016-00009]Additional Links
http://advances.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aar8241ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1126/sciadv.aar8241