BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND—Archaeologists from the University of Birmingham selected 60 samples of animal bones, plant remains, and building timbers from the site of Assiros in northern Greece that were radiocarbon dated and correlated at the University of Oxford and the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Heidelberg. “Until very recently the chronology of the later part of the Greek Bronze Age was entirely based upon historical dates derived from Egypt and the Near East with the aid of exported or imported objects such as Minoan or Mycenaean pottery or Egyptian scarabs,” Ken Wardle of the University of Birmingham told Phys.org. The new radiocarbon dates, however, suggest that the Greek Bronze Age ended 70 to 100 years earlier than had been previously thought. “This is a fundamental reassessment and it is important not just for Greece but in the wider Mediterranean context. It affects the ways in which we understand the relationships between different areas, including the hotly debated dates of developments in Israel and Spain,” he added. For more on the end of this era, see ARCHAEOLOGY’s “Drought May Have Doomed Bronze Age Civilizations.”
