I loved Wood’s program and book and seem to recall that the letters were dated by the stratum at which they were found and the general date of the Hittite Empire is fairly well established as well. So the date around 1200 seems to be about right.
Nope, the dating of the “Hittite” empire hangs off the Egyptian pseudochronology, there’s no stratigraphic dating of anything, except relative within the dig. The advantage to that approach is being able to throw out anything that shows up in the “wrong” strata. And if you read this PLOS sourced paper, you’ll notice that they presume to nail the *exact* date of the invisible Sea Peoples to a two year period, despite the RC dating margin of error. [snip] we establish an absolute age range of 1192–1190 BC for terminal destructions and cultural collapse in the northern Levant. [/snip] It won’t hold up, not least because there’s literally zero evidence for the group.