Precise and direct dating of the Minoan eruption of Santorini (Thera) in Greece, a global Bronze Age time marker, has been made possible by the unique find of an olive tree, buried alive in life position by the tephra (pumice and ashes) on Santorini. We applied so-called radiocarbon wiggle-matching to a carbon-14 sequence of tree-ring segments to constrain the eruption date to the range 1627-1600 B.C. with 95.4% probability. Our result is in the range of previous, less precise, and less direct results of several scientific dating methods, but it is a century earlier than the date derived from traditional Egyptian chronologies.

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Cherubini et al. (above) question the reliability of identifying annual growth increments in olive trees, and therefore voice caution against the result of the wiggle-match of the four sections of a branch of an olive tree to the 14C calibration curve. Friedrich et al. (2006) were well aware of the problematic density structure of olive trees, and therefore assigned rather wide error margins of up to 50 per cent to the ring count. This still resulted in a late seventeenth century BC youngest date for the modelled age range of the outermost section of wood (95.4% probability). One can even remove any constraint from ring counting altogether and model the four radial sections as a simple ordered sequence, in which only the relative position is used as prior information, in other words that outer sections are younger than inner ones in a radial section.