ABSTRACT
Tel Dan is situated at a choice location at one of the main sources of the Jordan River in the northernmost part of Israel between the Galilee and the Golan. The mound covers an area of 20 hectares and is composed of strata ranging from the Neolithic to the Islamic period. The site was first identified with the biblical city of Dan in 1838 by the American scholar-explorer Edward Robinson (1841). Archaeological excavations were carried out by Biranfrom 1966 to 1999. A bilingual dedicatory inscription of the Hellenistic period in ancient Greek and Aramaic mentions ‘…the god who is in Dan’, confirming the identification of the site (Biran1994: 221-24). A unique basalt stele discovered in 1993, inscribed with text in Old Aramaic dated to the 9th century BCE mentions both ‘the king of Israel’ and the ‘House of David’, the only extra-biblical example of the latter phrase (e.g. Biran and Naveh 1993, 1995; Schniedewind 1996). Organic samples from Tel Dan were investigated in our continuing research to establish independent radiocarbon chronologies of selected sites in the Eastern Mediterranean region as a
chronological basis for interdisciplinary studies (Bowman, Bruins, and van der Plicht 2001; Bruins and Mook 1989; Bruins, Mazar, and van der Plicht 2003a, 2003b, in press; Bruins and van der Plicht 1998, 2003; van der Plicht and Bruins 2001). In this paper we present 20 Iron-Age dates of Tel Dan, 16 from charcoal and 4 from charred seeds. Although short-lived organic material is clearly preferable, charcoal dates can still be meaningful and should be used in the absence of charred seeds. Most dates are derived from Stratum V, but Strata VI, IVB, IVA and III are also represented. Materials and Methods
Charcoal samples exhibiting a wood structure were examined by microscope at the Department of Plant Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to determine the wood species. The organic samples from Tel Dan, charcoal and charred seeds, were dated at the Radiocarbon Laboratories of the Centre for Isotope Research at the University of Groningen. Samples of sufficient size (grams of carbon) were dated conventionally by Proportional Gas Counting (PGC; laboratory code GrN). The smaller (mg size) samples, containing too little carbon for conventional counting measurements, were measured by AMS (laboratory code GrA). The standard deviation for the conventional method is 15-50 BP, depending on sample size; for AMS the precision is 4050 BP. All samples were first treated by the acid/alkali/acid (AAA) method (Mook and Waterbolk 1985). The larger samples were subsequently combusted to CO2. The radioactivity of the 14C was measured in gas counters for a number of days in order to obtain the best possible precision (small standard deviation). The purified organic matter of the small-sized samples was converted into CO2 and then into solid carbon for measurement by Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) (van der Plicht et al. 2000). Calibration of the radiocarbon dates from conventional radiocarbon years BP to calendar years BCE is based on dendrochronological atmospheric data from Stuiver et al. (1998), using the OxCal v3.9 program (Bronk Ramsey 1995, 2001, 2003), by which a resolution of 2 (r:2) and round-off age ranges of one year are specified in relation to the program calculations. Iron Age Radiocarbon Dates of Tel Dan in Relation to the Archaeology
Stratum VI The oldest Iron Age IA level of occupation at Tel Dan is Stratum VI, dated by Biran (1994: 134) to the 12th century BCE (Table 19.1). Pottery in this stratum includes the first appearance of collaredrim pithoi, the dominant pithos type. The body of this type of jar was made by hand, but the neck was manufactured on the potter’s wheel. Painted decoration, common in the previous period, occurs mainly on alabastra and flasks. The imported Mycenaean and Cypriot pottery of the previous Late Bronze (LB) levels (Stratum VII) are no longer present (Ilan 1999). One charcoal sample of wood (Quercus ithaburensis/boissieri) came from Stratum VI, from destruction debris associated with ash pits and metallurgy installations (Table 19.1). The radiocarbon date 2990 ± 50 BP (GrA-9610) gives a calibrated age of 1367-1129 cal BCE. The 13C value of –24.40 ‰ is typical for wood (Table 19.1). These 14C results characterise the age of the wood, which is likely to be older by an unknown margin than the destruction event. The calibrated age range 1266-1188 cal BCE, having the highest relative probability (33.5%), is indeed slightly older but overlaps nicely with the 12th century BCE archaeological dating (Table 19.2) for Stratum VI by Biran (1994) and the more specific archaeological dating of 1200-1150 BCE by Ilan (1999).
