Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
Yay, for once somebody at Sb except me is writing about European archaeology! SciBling Chris at Highly Allochthonous offers a long thoughtful writeup of a recent geology paper on the post-glacial flooding of the Black Sea basin and its possible effect on neolithisation. With a beautiful colour map of the European neolithisation wave!
Note that all the radiocarbon dates in Chris's entry are uncalibrated ones. 8300 BP is the raw radiocarbon date for the flood event, but that isn't equivalent to 6300 BC, it's more like 7400 cal BC. (The Maglemose era, for you Scandies.) Free on-line radiocarbon calibration and an explanation for why it's needed can be had at OxCal's site.
Comments
Your link to Chris's article is broken.
http://scienceblogs.com/highlyallochthonous/2007/11/the_black_sea_flood_and_the_ri.php
Posted by: Gene Goldring | November 24, 2007 4:04 AM
Whoops, thanks!
Posted by: Martin R | November 24, 2007 4:42 AM
Thanks for the link! Out of interest, why do you say the results in the paper are uncalibrated? They talk about calibrating the dates (and mention using OxCal for the flooding dates), and give everything in calender years BP, so I assumed that they had.
Posted by: Chris Rowan | November 26, 2007 5:04 AM
Not having read the paper, I didn't say anything about what the dates are like there. But in your entry, you translated BP to BC by simply subtracting 2000, which is misleading.
Posted by: Martin R | November 26, 2007 5:43 AM