Where does CoD stand with the scientific dating for the explosion of Thera which is raising, rather than lowering, Bronze Age chronology?
In the mid-1980s dendrochronologists proposed a way of dating the explosion of Thera scientifically. They suggested that narrow tree-rings (caused by frost) around 1628 BC in North America reflected the adverse weather caused by the volcano. Such an event seemed to be confirmed by later finds of frost-ring damage in Irish tree-rings and a peak of sulphuric acid in the Greenland ice-cores. This ran counter to the archaeological dating of the Thera explosion to c. 1500 BC. Both vulcanologists (notably David Pyle of Cambridge) and archaeologists (notably Peter Warren of Bristol) advised caution about such “proxy dating”. Frost-ring damage and acidity peaks might well be caused by volcanic eruption, but there was no evidence to show which volcano was responsible. Nevertheless, by the 1990s an increasing number of scholars had jumped on the ‘scientific dating’ bandwaggon, attempting to raise the beginning of the Late Bronze Age Greece to accommodate the 1628 BC date. Manning (1992), for exa
