ABSTRACT
High Precision Dating and History Chronology in general, and the chronology of the Early Iron Age southern Levant in particular, is one of those subjects which is almost always guaranteed to make one’s head ache. This is not just because of the unusually contentious chronological problems, specific to the Early Iron Age Levant, which form the central subject of this volume, but also because when it comes to archaeological chronology generally we seem to spend much of our time trying to square circles, to combine chalk and cheese, by attempting to integrate into a single chronological scheme a number of different types of chronological frameworks that are based on quite different concepts of how the passage of time manifests itself in the archaeological record and, more importantly, how it can be measured. We find ourselves, in many ways, bashing our heads against a brick wall, much of the time attempting to do something that, viewed objectively from outside conventional archaeological ways of thinking, appears to run counter to common sense. For the late second and early first millennia BCE, this is a problem which has perhaps been most acute in areas like the Aegean and the East Mediterranean, which lie on the fringes (either geographically or chronologically) of historical areas or periods like the Egyptian New Kingdom and Third Intermediate, Middle-and Neo-Assyria, and Archaic Greece. Their position in these respects has meant that the search for politico-military ‘history’, characteristic of Old World archaeology generally in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries, has been a particularly dominant and persistent part of archaeological tradition in these areas. Moreover, in both Greece and the Holy Land this has been further fuelled by the towering presence, looming over the archaeology, of the Homeric epics and the Hebrew Bible respectively, with their deep emotional significance to large sections of the population of a much wider European and transatlantic world. If the main aim of
archaeology is to uncover ancient history (in the narrow sense of the word), or to prove the historicity of characters and events which figure in certain forms of ancient literature, then we need a truly historical chronology, like that of Classical Greece, based on archon lists and Olympic victors, or like that of ancient Egypt, based on royal reigns and conquests. This means that the archaeological record has to be calibrated in terms of single reliably recorded events-the sacking and destruction of a particular city, the death or accession of a particular ruler, the construction of a particular public building, the simultaneous re-location of a particular group of people-which require the ultimate in high precision dating. It looks, at first glance, as though the potential for that ultimate in high precision dating is now finally with us, in the prospect of species-and regionally-consistent dendrochronological sequences which may eventually provide a continuous link with the present day, and which meanwhile (despite the problems presented by regional 14CO2 offsets in the troposphere: Kromer et al. 2001; Manning et al. 2001a; Reimer 2001) will allow us to ‘wiggle-match’ floating sequences and calibrate with reliable precision the potentially much more plentiful supply of 14C determinations. So all our problems will be solved. Or will they? Will we actually end up with something as useful as it seems? I think my answer is ‘yes and no’. ‘Yes’, because if we want to put a precise date on the construction of a particular building, as long as we can be sure that we have the outer rings of the tree from which a particular beam was made, and as long as we can be sure that it was not re-used from an earlier building, then we shall be able to do it. ‘No’, partly because ‘wiggle-matching’ and calibration in itself will always be something of a creative art (Bronk Ramsey [Chapter 5, this volume]), but also because, more importantly, how far will this get us, unless we have a reliable and truly historical context in which to put it? The main use of such high chronological precision is in proving (or disproving) that we have found something we think we already know existed or happened. We may be able to show, for instance, that the tomb traditionally called Midas’s tomb at Gordion (Young 1981) was constructed rather earlier (ca. 740 BCE) (Manning et al. 2001a: 2534) than the conventional date (696-95 BCE) for Midas’s death provided by the late antique writer Eusebius (e.g. Helm 1956: 92). But, leaving aside the emotional thrill involved in gazing on the tomb of a famous historical or legendary character, does it really matter much whether the man buried in that tomb was someone called Midas (who may or may not have died in 696-95 BCE) or some other Phrygian bigwig with a different name? I am not sure that I, for one, care very much, since that tomb and its contents tell us much that is just as interesting as anything derived from literary history or legend, much of which seems improbable anyway. Similarly, if we believed that a Trojan War as described by Homer really took place at one of the wide range of dates later ascribed to it by various literary traditions, and if we were convinced that one of the successive cities of Troy was actually destroyed as a result of that war, high precision radiocarbon dating might be able to support or rule out the hypothesis that a particular building or habitation level of Troy was burnt within a particular narrow time span which was compatible with one of those dates. For many of us, however, this would contribute nothing to the problem of the historicity of the Homeric account of the Trojan War, and the question of the authenticity of the ‘history’ which we were trying to date precisely would remain entirely a matter of faith. Absolute dating fixes, whether by conventional archaeological cross-referencing with historical chronologies, by high precision 14C dating, by dendrochronology or any other scientific means either known or devisable, are not so much solutions to problems in themselves as contributory factors to much more complex methodological and theoretical problems concerning chronology and the way in which we use chronological information to interpret the archaeological record. These problems come down to the question of what we are actually dating-and why. By dendrodating oak coffins or structural beams, or by taking 14C measurements from short-life samples, such as a jarful of charred grain from a secure context, we may be able to put more or less precise dates
(in some cases perhaps very precise dates) on single events-the burial of an individual (more precisely, the felling of the tree used for a coffin), or the construction or burning of a buildingbut it is not clear that this tells us much beyond the individual events to which these dates apply. It may give us a detailed and very precise chronology for the death of an individual person, or for the architectural history of a building or even a site, but it is not going to help provide a year-by-year chronology for the archaeological record in general, with a resolution comparable to a historical chronology, which we are sometimes encouraged to believe is an achievable and desirable goal (Manning 1998). Even if it did, what use is this without the detailed narrative history which can be firmly tied to it? The temptation is that, if we do not have the real history, we create a pseudoevent-centred history, by converting anonymous individuals into legendary characters or burnt buildings into invasions or conquests (Leonard 1988; Maier 1986). The interpretation of the Aegean prehistoric archaeological record for much of the 20th century depended on pretending that destructions which took place while similar pottery was in use happened, not just in the same archaeological time, but in the same real time, and converting these into major ‘historical’ events: a Dorian invasion which knocked out the Mycenaean palaces at the end of the Bronze Age, or an earlier conquest of Minoan Crete by Mycenaean Greeks. With the illusion of a historical chronology provided by dating methods of ever higher resolution, my fear is that the temptation will be to create more pseudo-history of this event-centred kind. The Relativity of Ceramic Chronology
This brings me to another question: What does it mean to say, as has been stated recently, that the new dendro-dates from Assiros have provided an absolute date for the ‘beginning of the Greek Iron Age’ (or rather, its surrogate in the form of Protogeometric style pottery) of between 1080 and 1070 BCE (Kromer et al. 2004)? For a start, one has to understand that, from our current perspective, this has little or nothing directly to do with iron, but rather with a particular classification of ceramic styles which continue to be used, as a matter of convenience, to draw an arbitrary and entirely notional line between the Greek Bronze and Iron Ages. For this to seem even remotely comprehensible, it is necessary to appreciate the wider contexts of intellectual history in which the prehistoric archaeology of the Aegean and other areas of the Old World traditionally operated in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries AD, as a means of tracing, on the one hand, the technological progress of mankind, and, on the other hand, the ‘prehistory’ of particular ‘peoples’ (the conceptual entities on which modern nation states are built), whose essential and constant characteristics could conveniently be tracked through material cultural manifestations, such as the types and styles of pots they used or the way in which they disposed of their dead. As far as Greece is concerned, pottery labelled ‘Geometric’ (because of its style of decoration) was, from the late 19th century onwards, often associated with the arrival of northern (‘Dorian’) invaders who broke down the prehistoric (‘Mycenaean’) civilisation of Greece in the 12th and 11th centuries BCE and, in at least some versions, also introduced iron and cremation burial (Glotz 1925: 389; Skeat 1934; Tsountas and Manatt 1897: 131; cf. Hammond 1949). The appearance of both iron and ‘Geometric’ (or after ca. 1910 ‘Protogeometric’) pottery was thus seen as evidence of a new group of people in southern Greece. Even after the gradual separation of the elements of this ‘invader’ package, beginning in the late 1920s, and the recognition that Protogeometric pottery continued to make use of shapes and decorations characteristic of late ‘Mycenaean’ pottery, the idea persisted that the emergence of the Protogeometric style marked an important watershed in early Greek history. Still in 1952, in the words of V.R.d’A. Desborough, ‘it was the first example of a new creative spirit: the ideal of harmony and proportion, which is the distinguishing characteristic of Greek art and life’ (1952: 298).
