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Sea Surface Radiocarbon Reservoir Age Changes in the Aegean Sea from about 11,200 BP to Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2016

Yorgos Facorellis  and
Evi Vardala-Theodorou
Yorgos Facorellis*
Affiliation:
Department of Antiquities and Works of Art Conservation, Faculty of Fine Arts, Technological Educational Institute of Athens, Aghiou Spyridonos St., 12210 Egaleo, Athens, Greece
Evi Vardala-Theodorou
Affiliation:
Department of Antiquities and Works of Art Conservation, Faculty of Fine Arts, Technological Educational Institute of Athens, Aghiou Spyridonos St., 12210 Egaleo, Athens, Greece
*
Corresponding author. Email: yfacorel@teiath.gr.
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Abstract

Archaeological excavations in two coastal sites of Greece, Ftelia on Mykonos and Cyclops Cave on Youra, have provided suitable material (charcoal/marine mollusk shell paired samples deposited simultaneously in undisturbed anthropogenic layers) to estimate regional changes of the sea surface radiocarbon reservoir effect (ΔR) in the Aegean Sea. Moreover, pre-bomb 14C ages of marine mollusk shells of known collection date, from Piraeus and Nafplion in Greece and Smyrna in Turkey, also contributed to the marine reservoir calculation during recent years. In this article, these already published results, 10 in total, are considered and calibrated again using the latest issues of the calibration curves IntCal13 and Marine13. The same calibration data were applied to 11 more paired samples from the archaeological sites of Palamari on Skyros and Franchthi Cave in the Argolic Gulf, published here for the first time, in order to investigate the fluctuation of the reservoir ages R(t) and ΔR values in the Aegean Sea from ∼11,200 BP (∼13,000 cal BP) to present. Our data show that R(t) and ΔR values are not constant through time and may vary from 1220 ± 148 to −3 ± 53 yr and −451 ± 68 to 858 ± 154 14C yr, respectively. An attempt was also made to correlate these fluctuations with eastern Mediterranean paleo-environmental proxies and other relevant paleoceanographic data found in the literature.

Type
Articles
Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , 2015 , pp. 493 - 505
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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