- "The chronology of every country in ancient Western Asia bristles with problems."
- ---W.C. Hayes, Cambridge Ancient History I.1, (1970)
- "...one should at last be able to settle a further problem that has bedevilled the historical chronologies over the past 40 years, namely, the existence of three main versions, high, middle, and low chronologies, in both Egypt and Mesopotamia. Between the two extremes, the middle chronology is now the favourite, but as it represents a compromise, it is not necessarily therefore correct. The chaos caused by six historical chronologies, and three radiocarbon ones (uncorrected with 5568 half life, uncorrected with 5570 half life and the corrected one, which should henceforth be solely used), has made a synthesis of Near Eastern (grosso modo, including Egypt, Middle East, and Indus valley) cultural development almost impossible, or, at best, so fraught with chronological hurdles as to be virtually useless."
- ---J. Mellaart Antiquity (1979)
- "However, much of the period of time [with which Kuniholm is] concerned contains well-detailed ceramic chronologies for most questions. Thus the recent end of the tree-ring chronology is of little interest for anthropological archaeology."
- ---anonymous NSF Reviewer (1988)
- "Ha! Ha! and, again, Ha!"
- ---Peter I. Kuniholm (unpublished) (1990)
The work of the Aegean Dendrochronology Project has been and continues to be the building of long tree-ring chronologies for the Eastern half of the Mediterranean with the aim of helping to bring some kind of rational order to Aegean and Near Eastern chronology from the Neolithic to the Present. See the summary bargraph of our achievements as of October 1990 on the next page. Since these chronologies are self-standing (i.e., independent of king-lists, generations of potters, etc.), beginning with the tree-rings of the living forests of Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Italy, and Cyprus, extending the sequences back through the rings of timbers collected from medieval monuments, and then continuing as far as the evidence will take us (Chalcolithic, so far, with Neolithic in sight), we feel free from some of the frustrations evident in the first two quotations above and of which the author of the third seems unaware. That is to say, we do not have to take a high, middle or low stance when we begin, and indeed we like to think that we are in a better position to shed light on some of the thornier chronological issues than many of our colleagues.
In August and September 1989 personnel from the Ankara Museum conducted a rescue excavation in three tumuli at Ki