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...Last spring, Manning realized he could solve the problem by looking elsewhere -- hundreds of kilometers away from Thera -- to regions of the Aegean Sea that experienced the tsunami effects caused by the eruption. Manning incorporated dates obtained for these episodes into his model to test for, and discount, the volcanic carbon dioxide caveat. On Thera itself, he also spotted the importance of a short but clearly observed gap in time between the abandonment of the town at Akrotiri and the huge eruption, and he incorporated this previously overlooked constraint into the modeling....

Lower sea levels over the last 360,000 years are linked with more eruptions When sea level drops far below the present-day level, the island volcano Santorini in Greece gets ready to rumble. A comparison of the activity of the volcano, which is now partially collapsed, with sea levels over the last 360,000 years reveals that when the sea level dips more than 40 meters below the present-day level, it triggers a fit of eruptions. During times of higher sea level, the volcano is quiet, researchers report online August 2 in Nature Geoscience. Other volcanoes around the globe are probably similarly...

The dating of a piece of olive tree found on Thirasia will move the dating of the eruption of Santorini's volcano a few decades later than current estimates, the Ministry of Culture and Sports said on Friday. The wood was found in the area "Kimissi Thirassias", the prehistoric settlement which lies on a hillside of the island once connected to Thira, or Santorini, at least up to the Middle Bronze Age, before the volcano exploded. The settlement is on top of a hill on the southern side of Thirasia, and on the edge of the caldera that existed before the...

...in the northwestern part of the settlement, where in the previous excavation period very strong retaining walls had been discovered at a height of almost two meters, two building interiors (X1, X2), one containing a bench, and an exterior courtyard also with a bench. The layers of lava and ash from the eruption of the Santorini volcano covering this part of the settlement remains contributed considerably to their being perfectly preserved (fig. 2). The above areas were thoroughly excavated thus clarifying matters of their form, nature and chronology, with the presence of both Middle Cycladic layers and Early Cycladic phases...

Monkeys appear in Grecian frescoes dating back to the Bronze Age 3,600 years ago, but monkeys aren't native to Greece or the Aegean isles. But it's clear that the artists actually saw these monkeys in Grecian frescoes, or at least talked to someone who did in great detail, because the depictions are so accurate that researchers can identify the monkeys, according to a new study. Vervet monkeys appear in a fresco from Akrotiri, Thera. They're known for their rounded muzzles, a white band on the forehead, an extended tail and elongated limbs -- all accurately shown in the fresco. Baboons...

A Bronze Age painting on a Greek island shows a monkey from thousands of kilometres away in Asia. The finding suggests that ancient cultures separated by great distances were trading and exchanging ideas. The artwork is one of several wall paintings in a building at Akrotiri on the Greek island of Thera (Santorini) in the Aegean Sea. Akrotiri was a settlement of the Minoan civilisation in Bronze Age Greece that was buried by ash from a volcanic eruption in around 1600 BC. Many of the paintings show monkeys, yet there were no monkeys in Greece at the time. Most of...

Situated in the building known as 'House of Desks' -- near the spot where the exquisite golden ibex was found in 1999 -- the finds include a marble protocycladic female figurine, two small marble protocycladic collared jars, a marble vial and an alabaster vase, which were found inside clay chests of rectangular shape. According to a culture ministry statement, the finds were made under rubble inside a large and probably public building that is south of Xeste 3, near where the golden ibex now on display at the Museum of Prehistoric Thira was also found in a clay chest beside...

More than 1,000 tourists a day visit the island of Santorini from cruise ships in the peak season. They use traditional transport on the hilly terrain - where cars cannot go - and are attracted to idyllic white houses in places such as the principal town of Fira. Every day the donkeys make four to five journeys up its 520 white cobbled steps in temperatures of up to 86F (30C). Animal rights activists claim donkeys are increasingly left with spinal injuries and open wounds from ill-fitting saddles. They say that, with obesity on the rise, the animals are being forced...

...by resolving discrepancies between archeological and radiocarbon methods of dating the eruption, according to new University of Arizona-led research... "It's about tying together a timeline of ancient Egypt, Greece, Turkey and the rest of the Mediterranean at this critical point in the ancient world -- that's what dating Thera can do," said lead author Charlotte Pearson, an assistant professor of dendrochronology at the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research... Archeologists have estimated the eruption as occurring sometime between 1570 and 1500 BC by using human artifacts such as written records from Egypt and pottery retrieved from digs. Other researchers estimated the...

The completion of the... third season of systematic excavations..., conducted at the site of Katalymmata ton Plakoton, of the Akrotiri peninsula, on the south coast, under the directions of the Senior Archaeological Officer of the Department Eleni Procopiou. During this season the excavation of the rest of the western part of what was most probably the narthex of a very important ecclesiastical building of the end of the 6th or the beginning of the 7th century A.D., which began in 2007, was completed. The narthex has a total length of 14m on an E-W axis and a width of 36m...

Moscow places S-400 'Growlers' in Syria's Latakia base, in an escalation that places Ben-Gurion Airport within range. Russia has revealed in photographs that it has deployed a highly advanced anti-missile system in western Syria, that is capable of downing planes taking off in Tel Aviv. The S-400 anti-missile system, known to NATO as the SA-21 "Growler," was shown to be stationed in the Latakia Airbase on the Syrian coast of the Mediterranean Sea in photographs released by the Russian military, reports the Daily Mail on Thursday. In the past there have been Arab media reports of Israeli airstrikes in Latakia...

Cyprus will offer Russia military facilities on its soil, President Nicos Anastasiades said on Friday. In an interview with a local newspaper, Anastasiades said that a pact strengthening defense relations between the two countries will be signed when he visits Moscow on Feb. 25. "There is an old (defense) agreement which is to be renewed as it is. At the same time, some additional facilities will be provided just like we do with other countries - France and Germany for example," Anastasiades said. Cyprus is currently providing facilities to French planes, such as refueling and maintenance at an air force...

A 3,500-year-old inscription on a stone block found in Egypt is what archaeologists say the oldest weather report of the world. The inscription on a six-foot-tall calcite stone, called the Tempest Stela, describes rain, darkness and "the sky being in storm without cessation, louder than the cries of the masses," according to Nadine Moeller and Robert Ritner at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute who have translated the 40-line inscription. The stela's text also describes bodies floating down the Nile like "skiffs of papyrus." "This was clearly a major storm, and different from the kinds of heavy rains that Egypt...

WASHINGTON - Compared to the well-studied world of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the civilizations that flourished in the eastern Mediterranean just before Homer’s time are still cloaked in mystery. Even the basic chronology of the region during this time has been heatedly debated. Now, a resolution has finally emerged -- initiated, quite literally, by an olive branch.Scientists have discovered the remains of a single olive tree, buried alive during a massive volcanic eruption during the Late Bronze Age. A study that dates this tree, plus another study that dates a series of objects from before, during and after the eruption,...

Two olive branches buried by a Minoan-era eruption of the volcano on the island of Thera (modern-day Santorini) have enabled precise radiocarbon dating of the catastrophe to 1613 BC, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 years, according to two researchers who presented conclusions of their previously published research during an event on Tuesday at the Danish Archaeological Institute of Athens. Speaking at an event entitled "The Enigma of Dating the Minoan Eruption - Data from Santorini and Egypt", the study's authors, Dr. Walter Friedrich of the Danish University of Aarhus and Dr. Walter Kutschera of the Austrian...

April 28, 2006Cornell study of ancient volcano, seeds and tree rings, suggests rewriting Late Bronze Age Mediterranean history By Alex Kwan Separated in history by 100 years, the seafaring Minoans of Crete and the mercantile Canaanites of northern Egypt and the Levant (a large area of the Middle East) at the eastern end of the Mediterranean were never considered trading partners at the start of the Late Bronze Age. Until now. Trenchmaster Vronwy Hankey and foreman Antonis Zidianakis excavate storage jars from the Minoan settlement Myrtos-Pyrgos. The jars were analyzed in the Cornell study using radiocarbon analyses. Cultural links between...

During the Late Bronze Age, the Aegean volcanic island of Thera erupted violently, spreading pumice and ash across the eastern Mediterranean and triggering frosts as far away as what is now California. The Theran town of Akrotiri was completely buried. Tsunamis up to 12 meters high crashed onto the shores of Crete, 110 kilometers to the south, and the cataclysm may ultimately have sped the demise of Crete's famed Minoan civilization. For nearly 30 years, archaeologists have fought over when the eruption took place. Those who rely on dates from pottery styles and Egyptian inscriptions put the event at roughly...

University of Rhode Island professor Robert Ballard... was slated to... meet up with the crew of the... 185-foot-long research vessel Endeavor... Ballard, notably known for his 1985 discovery of the Titanic, will be heading up a team of scientists from URI's Graduate School of Oceanography, the Institute for Exploration, and the Institute of Oceanography of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research in Athens. Scientific operations for the expedition began on Apr. 26 and will continue through June 18... The first leg of the expedition will be to the Greek island of Thera, also known as Santorini, to study the sea...

Pumice as a Time Witness Technische Universität WienJune 23,2008 Three different pumice samples A chemist of Vienna University of Technology demonstrates how chemical fingerprints of volcanic eruptions and numerous pumice lump finds from archaeological excavations illustrate relations between individual advanced civilisations in the Eastern Mediterranean. Thanks to his tests and to the provenancing of the respective pumice samples to partially far-reaching volcanic eruptions, it became possible to redefine a piece of cultural history from the second millenium B.C. Vienna (TU). During the Bronze Age, between the years 3000 and 1000 B.C., the Mediterranean was already intensely populated. Each individual culture,...

According to a recent international study, the volcano of the island Santorini, Greece, erupted in the 16th century BC and not earlier. The survey characterized a number of research studies that took place in the past and have indicated that Santorini's volcano may have erupted a century earlier, as unreliable because the method based on tree-ring measurements that they used, could not provide them with accurate results. An international team of researchers led by Paolo Cherubini from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) has demonstrated in the scientific journal Antiquity, that this method cannot provide...