Pottery Styles and Chronology
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In this, I shall assume that the working life of a potter was some 25 years, which on present estimates of life expectancy at that time, is not too wild an estimate. Taking each stylistic phase in turn, my impressions are as follows:
LM IA is clearly a stage of slow evolution and could have taken three generations - 75 years (Furumark allots it 50 years).
LM IB is marked by the products of a small number of outstanding potters who appear to have exploded onto the scene almost overnight. At least I can distinguish no early stage leading up to their products, which are almost everywhere present in the LM IB destructions on Crete. Nor can I distinguish a post-destruction LM IB stage. So, I would allot only one generation to this stage - 25 years (Furumark allows 50 years).
LM II is in many ways an introductory stage leading into LM IIIA1. I can perceive little internal development within the stage and find it difficult to ascribe to it more than one generation - 25 years (as does Furumark).
LM IIIA 1 is again very homogeneous with just some change at the end. Again, I would judge that it lasted no more than a generation - 25 years (as does Furumark).
LM IIIA 1 is a pivotal point at which to stop since at this stage (and fairly soon after at Amarna) we have direct correlations between the pottery styles and Egyptian chronology.
A tomb with only LM IIIA 1 pottery (and LH IIIA 1) at Sellopoulo near Knossos contained a scarab of Amenophis III, which brings us into the whirlpools of the Egyptian regnal years and differences of opinion as to their absolute dates. But to put this problem into perspective, differences for this reign (and of Akhenaton his successor) do not vary at extremes for more than some 20 years.
On the admittedly subjective basis which I have set out, I would now like to test the feasibility of the high dates being proposed for the Thera explosion, an event which is generally agreed took place when LM IA pottery was in use there. There is, too, general agreement about that pottery, that it belongs to an advanced stage in the period; I would say practically at its end.
I shall now take a position which is the most favourable to the new high chronology, and assume that LM IA pottery had still some 15 years to run after that on Thera and that the scarab in the Sellopoulo tomb was deposited at the end of LM IIIA 1 and at the beginning of Amenophis' reign. I must emphasize that I am not trying to establish the most likely chronology but that most favourable to a high chronology.
Rounding off the figures a little for convenience, the beginning of the reign of Amenophis III, at the two extremes of differing views, may be taken as either 1400 or 1380. Counting back to the explosion of Thera on my subjective stylistic basis for the pottery, we have 25 years each for LM IIIA 1, LM II and LM IB - 75 years - plus the 15 theoretical years between that event and the end of LM IA, i.e. 90 years in all.
90 years before the beginning of the reign of Amenophis III brings us to 1480 or 1460, at the best 140 years later than the event around 1625 responsible for the anomalies in the ice-core and tree-ring sequences.
To accept that event as being the explosion of Thera, would mean either that my stylistic appreciation is quite wrong and that two more generations of potters should be added, say to each of the LM IB, LM II, and LM IIIA 1 stages, which to me would appear a nonsense, or that Egyptian absolute dates at this stage are some 150 years wrong. No support for the latter alternative is given by, say, the Amarna C-14 dates, cited in the paper by Weninger, where there is close correspondence with the historical dates, and for the XVIIIth Dynasty in general, as is observed in that paper.
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| Source: | "Thera and the Aegean World III" Volume Three: "Chronology" |
| Proceedings of the Third International Congress, Santorini, Greece, 3-9 September 1989. | |
| Pages: | pp. 27 - 28 |
| Written by: | M.R. Popham |
| Institute of Archaeology, 36 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PG, England | |
| Book information: | |
| ©The Thera Foundation | |
| ISBN: | 0 9506133 6 3 |
| ISBN (Vol 1-3) | 0 9506133 7 1 |
| Published by: | The Thera Foundation, 105-109 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 3UQ, England |
| Editor: | D.A. Hardy with A.C. Renfrew |
| To order the 3 vol. book from amazon.co.uk: | http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0950613371/qid%3D1142955023/202-1072334-5731058 |