by Walter Friedrich
When in 1967 excavation started of a Bronze Age city buried under pumice of the Santorini volcano, a fierce debate started whether the city was buried around 1500 BC or a hundred years earlier. While one group supported their assessment on the list of the Pharaohs’ reigns , another group relied on absolute ice core dating from Greenland and wooden ring chronology. This group dated the eruption to take place approx. in the 1600s BC.
Several conferences have been held and hundreds of pages written about the subject, and new dating results have often been published in Nature and Science.
When in 2006 three researchers at Aarhus University (Walter L. Friedrich , Jan Heinemeier and Tom Pfeiffer) together with a group from Germany (Bernd Kromer, Michael Friedrich and Sarah Talamo ) published the results of their radiocarbon dating in Science, many thought this was end of discussion – however, on the contrary. It was a new beginning
In 2013 a full illustrated 613 page book was published as a result of a conference held 2011 in Halle, Germany (http://www.lda-lsa.de/tagungen/archiv_tagungen/4_mitteldeutscher_archaeologentag_2011/).
The title is: 1600 - Cultural change in the shadow of the Thera eruption?
As the title indicates, the major part of participants were supporters of our dating (1613 ± 13 ).
Opponents probably now prepare for the next move.
Extracts from the book (pdf-files)
