Report on the First Stage of the Iron Age Dating Project in Israel: Supporting a Low Chronology

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The traditional chronology of ancient Israel in the 11th-9th centuries BCE was constructed mainly by correlating archaeological phenomena with biblical narratives and with Bible-derived chronology. The chronology of Cyprus and Greece, and hence of points further west, are in turn based on that of the Levant. Thus, a newly proposed chronology, about 75-100 yr lower than the conventional one, bears crucial implications not only for biblical history and historiography but also for cultural processes around the Mediterranean. A comprehensive radiocarbon program was initiated to try and resolve this dilemma. It involves several hundreds of measurements from 21 sites in Israel. Creating the extensive databases necessary for the resolution of tight chronological problems typical of historical periods involves issues of quality control, statistical treatment, modeling, and robustness analysis. The results of the first phase of the dating program favor the new, lower chronology.

14C Dates and the Iron Age Chronology of Israel: A Response

“…Since this date has great importance for all of Eastern Mediterranean archaeology, in this paper we examine the results in light of the dates published in the above-mentioned article. Our paper was revised in light of new data and interpretations published by Sharon et al (2007). Figure 4 indicates that the transition between Iron I and II probably occurred between these above-mentioned destruction events and the dates achieved in our Models C2 or C3, namely during the first half of the 10th century BCE.…”

“…1 A second batch of dates, measured at the Weizmann Institute in the 1990s, comes from Tel Dor (Gilboa and Sharon 2001Sharon , 2003. The Early Iron Age Dating Project led by Boaretto, Gilboa, Jull, and Sharon Sharon et al 2005Sharon et al , 2007 set as its objective to obtain as many 14 C determinations as possible from Iron I-IIA sites in Israel measured at different laboratories, and in this way, attempts to resolve the chronological debate. Since this project is of the utmost importance to our field, we find it interesting to examine the results published so far, and in particular to evaluate the conclusion that the transition from Iron I to Iron IIA occurred about 900 BCE.…”

“…We also added an additional date from Tell Qasile measured at Groningen (QS5 in Table 3) and 2 dates from an Iron IIA context in the Negev Highlands. However, since our initial paper was written before the appearance of Sharon et al (2007), we retained the original structure of our tables and the averages as cited from Boaretto et al (2005) and Boaretto (2006), even though in some cases they were slightly different from those presented by Sharon et al (2007).…”

“…Future studies will have to combine all the available data concerning this period. We did not include in our tables calibrated dates (most of these are presented in Sharon et al 2007: Table 8). …”

High-precision radiocarbon dating and historical biblical archaeology in southern Jordan

“…The application of high-precision radiocarbon dating, Bayesian analysis, and spatial modeling at IA sites in the southern Levant is an important tool for researchers interested in the relationship between ancient texts such as the HB and extrabiblical data including Egyptian, Assyrian, and other epigraphic sources with the archaeological record (15,34). Given the unambiguous 14 C AMS dating evidence presented here for industrial-scale metal production at KEN during the 10th and 9th c. BCE in ancient Edom, the question of whether King Solomon's copper mines have been discovered in Faynan returns to scholarly discourse.…”