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Aegeus Society For Aegean Prehistory

ARTICLES | 2014

22 December 2014

A disastrous date

J. Alexander MacGillivray Antiquity 88:339 (March 2014), 288-290

From the introduction

Paolo Cherubini and colleagues have demonstrated convincingly that the identification of olive wood tree-rings from Santorini is ‘practically impossible’. Thus, the single piece of evidence that might have persuaded some archaeologists to support the ‘high’ 1613±13 BC date for the Theran eruption is hors de combat. The Theran olive-tree branch has gone the way of the Greenland Ice Core results of similar date and which enjoyed a similar devoted following until shown to be from a different eruption.