With National Science Foundation (NSF) support, Drs. Sturt Manning and Timothy Jull, together with a postdoctoral scholar, other colleagues, and US students, will collect and analyze tree-rings from southern Jordan, Europe and North America in order to investigate and establish what is the appropriate radiocarbon timeline for archaeological and environmental dating in the southern Levant and east Mediterranean region. This issue is critical for determining the correct timeframe for Biblical Archaeology - and so early Biblical history - as well as the timeframes and histories of the other important ancient cultures of the Near East and east Mediterranean region. Over the last two decades there has been much unresolved debate on this topic.
Radiocarbon (14C) is the main science-based method used to most date sites and finds in the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean in the period before about 500 BCE (before the historical civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome). Radiocarbon dating has become increasingly precise in recent years, and employs sophisticated analytical approaches. As a result there have been active and vigorous debates over key topics like the exact dating of early Israel and the precise timeframe of early Biblical history, among others. These debates have serious implications for how we interpret and understand the early history of these civilizations and have profound effects on a number of fields centered on the history and culture of the world of the Hebrew Bible and its contemporaries. But, as precision and resolution have increased, some previously disregarded issues relevant to radiocarbon dating such as, the potential relevance of differences in the growing seasons of plants in different areas - start to become critically important if the correct high resolution chronology is to be achieved.
Using known-age tree-ring samples - precise to the calendar year - from the east Mediterranean and southern Levant, and comparing these with known age tree rings from Germany, Ireland and the North America, in the context of a carefully-designed program of high-resolution accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) radiocarbon analysis capable of resolving radiocarbon levels to within about 3 parts per thousand, this project will investigate and quantify what is the appropriate radiocarbon calibration dataset for the southern Levant and east Mediterranean region (and quantify the nature and scale of any growingseason-related offset). This will provide the basis for archaeological, early historical and environmental chronologies in the Near East and east Mediterranean to be both accurate as well as precise.
The project will develop existing collaborative research on tree-rings in Jordan by the Cornell Laboratory in partnership with the American Centre of Oriental Research (ACOR) in Amman, Jordan, and will involve a postdoctoral scholar, a graduate student, and undergraduate students in the Cornell laboratory. The radiocarbon work on known-age tree-ring samples at the University of Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) Laboratory, will provide an important opportunity to test and develop the accuracy and precision of this key US facility central to NSF sponsored radiocarbon-based work across several fields from archaeology to a range of the environmental and geological sciences.
