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Science 28 April 2006:
Vol. 312. no. 5773, p. 548
DOI: 10.1126/science.1125087
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Brevia

Santorini Eruption Radiocarbon Dated to 1627-1600 B.C.

Walter L. Friedrich,1* Bernd Kromer,2 Michael Friedrich,2,3 Jan Heinemeier,4 Tom Pfeiffer,1 Sahra Talamo2

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.

1 Department of Earth Sciences, University of Aarhus, DK-8000 Aarhus, C.F. Moellers Allé 1120, Denmark.
2 Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Institut fur Umweltphysik, Im Neuenheimer Feld 229, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany.
3 Institute of Botany, Hohenheim University, D-70593 Stuttgart, Germany.
4 Accelerator Mass Spectrometry 14C Dating Centre, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Aarhus, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: walter{at}geo.au.dk

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)