New light on old pumice: the origins of Mediterranean volcanic material from ancient Egypt

The Date of the Minoan Santorini Eruption: Quantifying the “Offset”

“…In the framework of the SCIEM 2000 project, more than 350 samples of pumice from sites in Egypt and the Levant were analyzed by "chemical finger-printing" using neutron activation analysis (NAA) for 25 elemental concentrations (Bichler et al 1997(Bichler et al , 2007Peltz et al 1999;Bichler 2000;Huber et al 2003;Polinger et al 2003;Steinhauser et al 2006;Sterba et al 2009). Most samples analyzed have been found in Tell el-Dab c a; others come from Levantine sites including Tell el-Ajjul, Ashkelon, Megiddo and others.…”

“…Although more than 350 samples of pumice have been analyzed, only a few samples come from contexts of the Second Intermediate Period. As Sterba et al (2009) concluded: "... since the number of excavated samples from later periods greatly exceeds the number of samples from the earlier period, the pumice data are still not conclusive. "…”

Late Holocene terrestrial tephra record at western Anatolia, Turkey: Possible evidence of an explosive eruption outside Santorini in the eastern Mediterranean

“…in lakes Gölcük and Gölhisar (Sullivan, 1988;Eastwood et al, 1999Eastwood et al, , 2002. Such ash layers are also known in the Sea of Marmara and eastern Mediterranean Sea and they all have mostly been attributed to the Aegean volcanic arc (Narcisi and Vezzoli, 1999;Wulf et al, 2002;Aksu et al, 2008;Sterba et al, 2009). Shortly, the present knowledge inspires that possible source of the Çardak tephra should be sought within volcanoes in the Aegean Sea.…”

“…Products of these provinces have been detected well within the marine sediments of the Aegean Sea as six groups of tephra layers originated from different sources (Aksu et al, 2008). The large-scale activities of volcanoes in these regions since the late Pleistocene can be followed clearly within lacustrine and marine archives and even at cultural sites (Roberts, 1983;Keller et al, 1989;Kuzucuoglu et al, 1998;Narcisi and Vezzoli, 1999;Polacci et al, 2003;Margari et al, 2007;Sterba et al, 2009;). The best known Quaternary eruption centres in the central and western parts of the Anatolian volcanic province are Erciyes-Dikkartın (Hamann et al, 2010), Konya-Karapınar (Keller, 1974), Konya-Karadağ , Kula and Uşak (Ercan, 1982;Ercan and Öztunalı, 1982;Richardson-Bunbury, 1996;Alıcı et al, 2002), Hasandağı (Aydar and Gourgaud, 1998) and Isparta-Gölcük (Alıcı et al, 1998;Nemec et al, 1998).…”

The aid of Bayesian radiocarbon modeling in assessing the chronology of Middle Bronze Age Sicily at the site level. A case study

“…It is likely that central Mediterranean people were active in eastern shores, as some (admittedly scant) evidence would indicate (Alberti, 2008b;Jung, 2009). As for local goods liable to be exported, it is likely that commodities exploited during the preceding stage of the Bronze Age (i.e., Early Bronze Age) such as sulfur (Castagnino Berlinghieri, 2003;Castellana, 1998Castellana, , 2000, pumice (Sterba et al, 2009) and amber (Angelini and Bellintani, 2005), continued to be exploited in MBA. As a number of studies have stressed, it is also likely that the use and appreciation of foreign goods went hand in hand with the development of different kinds of local social trajectories (Alberti, 2012;D'Agata, 1997D'Agata, , 2000Smith, 1987;Van Wijngaarden, 2002;Vianello, 2005) to which the architectural development/transformation of settlements (or part thereof) (Alberti, 2012(Alberti, , 2014bDoonan, 2001;Lukesh, 1995, 2001;Militello, 2004;Tomasello, 2004), tomb typology (Tomasello, 1996), and the development of local metalworking (Albanese, 2006;Bietti Sestieri, 1997;D'Agata, 1986) were possibly linked.…”