2006/04/27 by Walter Friedrich, Bernd Kromer, Michael Friedrich +3 · 4 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies #Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History #Radiocarbon dating #Tephra #Geology #Pumice #Sequence (biology) #Bronze Age #Range (aeronautics) #Chronology #Volcano #Archaeology #Paleontology #Geography
paper · doi:10.1126/science.1125087
openalex publication_date 2006/04/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Precise and direct dating of the Minoan eruption of Santorini (Thera) in Greece, a global Bronze Age time marker, has been made possible by the unique find of an olive tree, buried alive in life position by the tephra (pumice and ashes) on Santorini. We applied so-called radiocarbon wiggle-matching to a carbon-14 sequence of tree-ring segments to constrain the eruption date to the range 1627-1600 B.C. with 95.4% probability. Our result is in the range of previous, less precise, and less direct results of several scientific dating methods, but it is a century earlier than the date derived from traditional Egyptian chronologies.