Decades ago, b.p. (before 1950), dating Bronze Age sites in the eastern Aegean seemed direct and reliable, given artifactual cross-ties with the astronomically calibrated Egyptian king lists that served as calendars. For instance, the association of Late Minoan IA ceramics in a Greek tomb with Egyptian scarabs provided a terminus ante quem age estimate for the ceramic style at ca. 1500 b.c., a nice round, memorable date. Ceramics of LMIA style were buried when the Thera volcano erupted on Santorini island, north of Crete, and 1500 b.c. was proposed as the date of the event (Marinatos 1939). The scale of the eruption, devastating to the town of Akrotiri, led archaeologists to try to relate it to catastrophic fires and building destruction elsewhere in the Aegean. When radiocarbon dating became available, scholars wanted to use that method to refine the dating of the eruption and test its synchroneity with destructive events nearby. The result of those efforts, and applications of additional dating methods, has been a vast, expanding, contentious literature that remains inconclusive. Why?

In the decade of the 1970s, charred organic samples from the Akrotiri excavations were sent to the radiocarbon laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, a respected research facility. The immediate results supported the traditional age, but tree-ring calibration produced dates implying an age greater than 1600 b.c. (Fishman et al. 1977). Efforts to explain the results focused at first on contamination by ancient carbon in volcanic gases venting nearby (Weinstein and Michael 1978).