The Thera eruption and Late Minoan-IB destructions on Crete

Abstract

MARINATOS' theory¹ of the decline of the Minoan civilisation by paroxysmal volcanic events of the Thera volcano is widely accepted, and many papers on the topic have been published, especially since the International Scientific Congress on the Volcano of Thera². The main and controversial problem is the fact that the simultaneous devastations of numerous Late Minoan (LM) IB sites and palaces in Crete are dated archaeologically (concerning the development of Minoan pottery) as 30–50 yr later than the destruction of the important LM settlement on Santorini (Acrotiri ruins)³. Following Marinatos' theory, that the devastations in Crete were caused by the Thera volcano, two eruptions (if chronology is correct) must have occurred. The first, destroying the LM-IA settlements on Santorini, in about 1500BC, the second, causing the LM-IB destructions in Crete, about 1450 BC. According to a recent theory, only LM-IA destructions on Crete are connected with the Thera outburst^4,5. We report here fieldwork on Santorini which shows clearly that neither products of two volcanic outbursts nor of a ‘two-phase’ eruption⁶, differing in a time interval of about 50 yr, exist, and that the collapse of the Santorini caldera, which caused devastating earthquakes and tsunamis in Crete, did not occur about 50 yr after the volcanic paroxysm.