Tree Ring and C14 Dating
"The third Thera Conference [Athens 1990] turned into a battleground between archaeology and the newer disciplines of dendrochronology and radiocarbon (C14) dating. Findings from these fields were thrown into the ring, and their supporters argued strongly that the eruption was to be dated more than a hundred years earlier to 1628/7 B.C.
- J. V. Luce, "The Changing Face of the Thera Problem"
"In several locations of the western United States lives the oldest known living thing on Earth: this is the Bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva). In one location at Campito Mountain in the White Mountains of California, living trees and deadwood pieces provide an accurate year-by-year tree ring sequence back to 3435 BC, a continuous record for five and one-half thousand years!
"V. C. LaMarche and Katherine Hirsckboeck have recently reported, in the magazine Nature, on a study of the frost damage in the rings of the Bristlecone pine. In the recent tree-ring records, they find a remarkable correlation between frost damage rings and the known date of large eruptions. For example, in the past 100 years, there have been four climactically important events: Krakatoa (1883), Pelee, Soufriere (1902), Katami (1912), and Agung (1963). In each case, a ring of frost damage was found and always in the same year if the eruption was early in the year or, otherwise, the next year. The frost ring never preceded the volcanic event, which seems to prove that the frost rings are the result of the eruption.
"When the tree ring record is examined back in time, there are some interesting results. Seventeen events are found in the rings between 2035 BC and 1884 AD. Some of these are known from other paleontological or historical evidence."
- Nigel Bunce and Jim Hunt, "Tree Rings and Volcanos"
"The California bristlecones record only two other frost-ring events during the first three millennia B.C., and both are easily identifiable in ocean sediments. The first freeze seems to be linked with the 1900 B.C. explosion of Mount St. Helens, only a few hundred miles north of the trees. The second front-ring event follows, by a year or less, the 44 B.C. eruption of Mount Etna, and also coincides with an acid signature in Greenland ice dating to about 50 B.C. (give or take twenty years)."
- Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) p. 236
"New data about climatically-effective volcanic eruptions during the past several thousand years may be contained in frost-damage zones in the annual rings of [pine] trees. There is good agreement in the timing of frost events and recent eruptions, and the damage can be plausibly linked to climatic effects of stratospheric aerosol veils on hemispheric and global scales. The cataclysmic proto-historic eruption of Santorini (Thera), in the Aegean, is tentatively dated to 1628-26 BC from frost-ring evidence."
- V.C. LaMarche, Jr. and K.K. Hirschboeck, 1984. "Frost rings in trees as records of major volcanic eruptions", Nature, v. 307, 121-126.
The suggestion the suggestion that the massive emission of ash from the Thera eruption was a possible cause in a global lowering of temperature was "was taken up by Dr Baillie in Belfast, who looked at his records for Irish (bog) oaks, and found a 'narrowest ring event' starting in 1628 B.C. Bailie has argued strongly that there is a causal relationship with Thera, and that the eruption provides a unique solution for the frost damage."
- J. V. Luce, "The Changing Face of the Thera Problem"
Further confirmation comes from the Greenland ice cap. Trace amounts of sulfur have been found in a layer which has been dated to the same period.
University of Copenhagen glaciologist Claus Hammer "acknowledges that ice-layer dates cannot be counted back as easily or precisely as Californian bristlecone rings. Keeping this limitation in mind, he places the acid snow at 1644 B.C., give or take twenty years."
- Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) p. 235
(2) Calibrated Radio-Carbon Dating
"From Thera itself came carbonized tree trunk, still rooted in Minoan soil at the bottom of the Fira quarry."
"The carbon-14 verdict from the Fira quarry trees was that life on the island had ended in the seventeenth century B.C. - about 1640>, give or take thirty years in either direction."
- Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) p. 233
"C-14 dates for short-lived materials from the Theran eruption span the period 1760-1540 BC with the great majority falling earlier in that period. As a result, in 1989 the Third International Thera Congress favored an eruption date between circa 1680 and 1670 BC."
- David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), p. 386
"Some Minoan experts, Philip Betancourt for instance, are prepared to accept the alternative 'high' dating for the eruption. Their willingness to do so is influenced by another line of evidence, that of radio-carbon (C14) dating. I have so far shrunk from deploying this subject because of its extreme complexity. At the time of the third Conference it did seem that on balance C14 dates derived from organic materials from the Akrotiri site favoured the higher dating. But there are many complicating factors, and the case is still being argued by the experts. There appear to be problems about sample contamination, and re-runs of tests on the same material sometimes produce different results. There are also fundamental problems about the recalibration curve and margins of error. It is possible that the C14 method may never be sufficiently precise to settle the issue. Archaeologists, like Peter Warren, who stick to the lower dating, can quote a modicum of dates that favour their side, and for the time being suspension of judgement seems the safest course."
- J. V. Luce, "The Changing Face of the Thera Problem"
"Oceanographer Daniel Stanley...and Harrison Cheng, both of the Smithsonian Institution, discovered a Nile Delta ash layer and have identified its chemical fingerprint as an exact match with ash from Thera....There is dead organic matter in the mud upon which the layer fell, and in the mud that was later deposited on top of it."
"'So we have the ash layer bracketed by radiocarbon dates,' explains Stanley. 'The mud tells us that the ash fell around thirty-five hundred years ago. If you consider that worms and other organisms were drilling up and down through the layers, stirring up the rotting leaves and reeds we are reading from, then our age uncertainties must allow for a hundred years or more in either direction. Mud is nowhere near as accurate as a California pine, but I think we're in the same time frame as the pine-tree freeze, within the errors of C-14."
- Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) pp. 238-239
"In the late 1970's when C-14 dates were corrected by use of the bristlecone pine calibration curves, a 'problem' soon became apparent for the third millennium BC and earlier times. In 1976, R. D. Long looked at the published radiocarbon dates and found them generally older than the historical chronology."
"In 1987, H. Haas et al., using high-precision methods discovered that Old Kingdom C-14 dates from Egypt were an average 374 years higher than the historical dates established for the associated archaeology given in the Cambridge Ancient History."
"What is much less well known is that the C-14 problem also affects Egypt's 18th Dynasty. We have towards the end of this dynasty a set of calibrated radiocarbon dates from Tell el-Amarna which tie in acceptably well with the conventional chronology. On the other hand, at the beginning of the dynasty we have the eruption of Thera, whose ash straddles the Late Minoan IA period (in Aegean archaeology terms). For many years archaeologists had tied LM 1A into the early 18th Dynasty on the basis of their ceramic chronology. This dated the eruption to the reign of Ahmose [1552-1527 B.C.E.] or later. The date for the eruption, established by archaeologists, has recently received dramatic confirmation in M. Bietak's discovery of pumice within a stratified context at Tell ed-Daba (Ezbet Helmi) which spans the period from Ahmose to Thutmose III (1539-1425 BC)."
[According the Rohl's New Chronology, the period from Ahmose to Thutmose III spanned 1194 to 1085 B.C.E.]
"In the conventional chronology, the earliest Ahmose could have reigned according to Egyptian dating is circa 1550 BC which is at least 120 years later than the date of the eruption established by the radiocarbon method....Clearly it would be inconsistent to use C-14 to fix an absolute date for just one end of this dynasty: it is therefore an 'all or nothing situation' in which radiocarbon dating has to be embraced (with all its consequences) or rejected - even where the dates it yields seem to agree with the chronology."
- David M. Rohl, A Test of Time: The Bible from Myth to History (1995), pp. 384, 386-387
(3) Confirmation from Historical Records
Support for placing the eruption of Thera in the seventeenth century B.C.E. comes from an ancient Chinese text referring to the time of King Chieh.
"King Chieh lived at the same time as T'ang (the first king of the Shang Dynasty), which, according to scribes, was sixteen generations before King Wen. Because the Chinese considered a generation to be thirty years long, one can infer that Chieh ruled about 480 years before Wen - around 1617 B.C., plus or minus a decade or two. Armed with additional eclipse dates for 1876 B.C. (twenty-five generations before Wen) and 1302 B.C. (five generations before Wen), Kevin Pang plotted the eclipses on a graph, fitting a curve through them and locating the point that, according to Chinese history, places Chieh sixteen generations before Wen."
- Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) pp. 237-238
"We find the date is again 1600 B.C., plus or minus thirty years. Thus the historical records confirm what was suggested by the ice cores, tree rings and older radiocarbon dates - that Thera [exploded] late in the seventeenth century B.C."
- Kevin Pang, "The Legacies of Eruption", The Sciences, 31 (1991) pp. 30-35
"After the appearance of LM1B pottery and the partial rebuilding of the palace at Knossos, one administrator or another built himself a tomb on the outskirts of the capital. When he died, the tomb was filled with objects from his life, including clay tablets covered with the early Greek Linear B script, examples of marine-style pottery and an alabaster vessel imported from Egypt and inscribed with the name of Tuthmosis III, who ruled for a time in a coregency with Queen Hatshepsut, history's first woman pharaoh."
"In the tomb of Semut, architect and vizier to Queen Hatshepsut, one wall is a fresco of men carrying Late Minoan 1A pottery vases. The men in the procession are wearing kilts identical to those worn by men at the helms of ships painted on a wall of Thera's West house. The implication is that the Semut fresco was completed during Crete's LM1A period, before Thera exploded."
"Men wearing Minoan clothes are next depicted in the tomb of User Amon, a vizier to Tuthmosis III about twenty years after the death of Semut. One of the Minoans is carrying a rhyton (an ornamented scoop) shaped into a bull's head. A ceramic scoop very much like this has been recovered from the ruins of Thera. An inscription in the Egyptian tomb refers to 'gifts from the islands of the Great Green'. It seems likely that the vizier sailed personally to at least one of the islands, as the ruins of Knossos bear a broken statue inscribed, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, with User's name."
"Amenophis II, who ruled from about 1600 B.C. [according to the conventional chronology], is the last pharaoh whose tomb hieroglyphs make reference to Keftiu [generally accepted as Minoan Crete]. On the walls are paintings of foreigners bearing Minoan objects. The Karnak tomb of Rekhmire, vizier to Tuthmosis III (who ruled during the fifty years preceding Amenophis II, and has long been regarded by biblical scholars as a pharaoh who oppressed Moses' people), also bears written references to Keftiu, beneath paintings of men carrying typically Minoan bowls and rhytons [LM1A style and one LM1B] (fragments of which were actually found buried in the tomb). But their hairstyles do not resemble the locks and half-shaven heads depicted on many Minoan frescos, and their kilts, which were originally painted to show Minoan styles, were painted over again to show a longer, more ornate style characteristic of early mainland Greece. The repainting seems to reflect Egyptian awareness of a shift of power in the Western sea."
- Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (1991) pp. 240, 241, 44
"The Egyptians in the mid-2nd millennium, knew that the Keftui came from Crete but later the name, like Kaptara [of Syrian writings], seems to have broadened its meaning to that of Aegean lands in general, or even parts of the Anatolian coast."
- N. K. Sandars, The Sea Peoples - Warriors of the Ancient Mediterranean 1978, p. 166
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