There are three principal methods in use for determining the absolute chronology of the Old World’s ancient cultures: (1) historical records, based on the manuscripts of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian kings and the Greek Olympiads; (2) dendrochronology; and (3) the radiocarbon dating method. The relative chronology of the Eurasian Steppe is determined using the stratigraphical data of the setdements and the burial grounds.
Determination of the absolute chronology is hindered by the following: (1) the population of the Steppe had neither writing nor its own chronological system; (2) the dendrochronological scale for the Bronze Age sites has not yet been elaborated; and (3) the old radiocarbon dates are scattered within too broad a range and, evidently, their use is methodologically incorrect. For instance, the age of Sintashta burial ground graves of the same type spans the interval between the years 2250-1390 B. c. (without calibration), although, according to A. A. Gavrilov’s dendrochronological data, this burial ground functioned for no longer than 130 years. The dispersion of the stratigraphically subsequent sites of the Alakul type is from the twenty-first to the fourteenth centuries B. C., of the still later Amangeldy type, eighteenth-fourteenth centuries B. C., while of the Yeniseian Fedorovo sites of the same type it spans from the twenty-seventh to the fifth centuries b. c., which is historically unacceptable (Kuzmina 1994c). That is why a skeptical attitude toward radiocarbon dates, particularly those that were calibrated, prevailed in Russian archaeology until recently, and the principal method of determination of the absolute chronology was that of analogies with the more reliably dated cultures of Western Europe, Southern Asia, and China. In recent years, however, in the laboratories of Europe and the United States, a new series of dates has been obtained, which requires revisiting the issue (Kuzmina 1998b).
World History
