The Synchronization of Civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Second Millennium BC: Natural Science Dating Attempts

Summary. This chapter reports on work undertaken during the first three years of a ten-year project which aims to synchronize a range of relative and absolute dating evidence arising from archaeological records of the civilizations of the East-ern Mediterranean in the second millennium BC. At present the team is collecting chronological information from many different geographical locations. Some of the chronological methods are covered in more detail elsewhere in this volume (e.g. teph-rochronology, Chapter 8 and radiocarbon dating with Bayesian models, Chapters 1 and 2) and other methods such as dendrochronology and astrochronology are ex-plained in detail here. It is already clear that the different dating methods do not lead directly to a coherent chronological picture for the region. Consequently, one of the major issues that must be tackled by this project is the synchronization of chronological evidence from different sources. This chapter outlines the nature of the evidence available and explains some of the techniques that the project team plans to use to link together the diverse dating evidence and thus develop their final chronological understanding