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Did Sea Water, Not Volcanic Ash, Smother the Minoans?
Friday, January 11, 2008
Blog Author: Ellery Frahm
![Keywords: sedimentology, tsunamis, volcanic ash, Thera, Minoans, Crete
Summary and Comments: For the past 70 years, archaeologists have widely held that the eruption of the Thera volcano put an end to the Minoan civilization. More recent excavations have revealed, though, that the Minoans seem to have survived that natural disaster only to be done in by another just a few decades later. Ash from the Thera eruption was found at the site, but it looked to have been washed into nooks and crannies. Then a highly disturbed sediment deposit filled with sherds, rocks, ash, and bone was also located by the archaeologists. The likely cause was a tsunami, and geologists were asked to help with the investigation.
Above: Palace ruins of Knossos, the political center of the Minoan civilization. Credit: Juan Manuel Caicedo.
Excerpt from Discover:
Did a Tsunami Wipe Out a Cradle of Western Civilization?
By Evan Hadingham
. . . [The Minoans] sprang up on the island of Crete, in the Aegean Sea, and rose to prominence some 4000 years ago, flourishing for at least five centuries. It was a civilization of sophisticated art and architecture, with vast trading routes that spread Minoan goods—and culture—to the neighboring Greek islands. But then, around 1500 B.C., the Minoan world went into a tailspin, and no one knows why.
In 1939, leading Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos pinned the blame on a colossal volcanic eruption on the island of Thera, about 70 miles north of Crete, that occurred about 1600 B.C. . .
On further examination, though, the ruins did not confirm the theory. It turned out that the pottery on Akrotiri was not from the final phase of Minoan culture; in fact, many Minoan settlements on Crete continued to exist for at least a generation or two after the Thera cataclysm. . .
MacGillivray also became interested in how the civilization ended. . . One striking find was the foundations of a fine mansion, paved with fancy purple schist and white limestone. . .
The house was dusted with a powdery gray ash, so irritating that the diggers had to wear face masks. Chemical analysis showed that the ash was volcanic fallout from the Thera eruption, but instead of resting in neat layers, the ash had washed into peculiar places: a broken, upside-down pot; the courtyard’s drain; and one long, continuous film in the main street outside. It was as if a flash flood had hosed most of the ash away, leaving these remnants behind. Some powerful force had also flipped over several of the house’s paving slabs and dumped fine gravel over the walls—but this part of the site lies a quarter of a mile from the sea. . .
The strangest and most significant find, however, was a soil layer down by the beach that looked like nothing MacGillivray had ever seen in four decades as a field archaeologist. A horizontal band of gravel about a foot thick was stuffed with a mad jumble of broken pottery, rocks, lumps of powdery gray ash, and mashed-up animal teeth and bones. Perhaps an exceptionally violent storm had inflicted this chaos, MacGillivray considered, but he began to suspect that a tsunami was the more likely culprit.
MacGillivray invited Hendrik Bruins to Palaikastro. The Dutch-born geoarchaeologist and human ecologist had a reputation as a skillful analyst of the thorny dating controversies that beset archaeology in the Middle East, but figuring out the chaotic layer overlooking the beach presented a novel scientific challenge. “Identifying a tsunami deposit is a completely new field,” Bruins explains. . .
To read the rest of the article, visit the Discover website:
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jan/did-a-tsunami-wipe-out-a-cradle-of-western-civilization](A1616153-A0CC-4A67-A2E9-0A74BF011D6F_files/shapeimage_2.png)
