Abstract
Paleomagnetic analysis of archaeological materials is crucial for understanding the behavior of the geomagnetic field in the past. As it is often difficult to accurately date the acquisition of magnetic information recorded in archaeological materials, large age uncertainties and discrepancies are common in archaeomagnetic datasets, limiting the ability to use these data for geomagnetic modeling and archaeomagnetic dating. Here we present an accurately dated reconstruction of the intensity and direction of the field in Jerusalem in August, 586 BCE, the date of the city’s destruction by fire by the Babylonian army, which marks the end of the Iron Age in the Levant. We analyzed 54 floor segments, of unprecedented construction quality, unearthed within a large monumental structure that had served as an elite or public building and collapsed during the conflagration. From the reconstructed paleomagnetic directions, we conclude that the tilted floor segments had originally been part of the floor of the second story of the building and cooled after they had collapsed. This firmly connects the time of the magnetic acquisition to the date of the destruction. The relatively high field intensity, corresponding to virtual axial dipole moment (VADM) of 148.9 ± 3.9 ZAm2, accompanied by a geocentric axial dipole (GAD) inclination and a positive declination of 8.3°, suggests instability of the field during the 6th century BCE and redefines the duration of the Levantine Iron Age Anomaly. The narrow dating of the geomagnetic reconstruction enabled us to constrain the age of other Iron Age finds and resolve a long archaeological and historical discussion regarding the role and dating of royal Judean stamped jar handles. This demonstrates how archaeomagnetic data derived from historically-dated destructions can serve as an anchor for archaeomagnetic dating and its particular potency for periods in which radiocarbon is not adequate for high resolution dating.
Highlights
Archaeomagnetism, the application of paleomagnetic methods to archaeological materials, is interdisciplinary in its methods and in its impact
The monumentality of the structure discussed above, its total destruction by fire and its dating to the end of the Iron Age lead to the conclusion that this was one of Jerusalem’s administrative or elite structures destroyed by Nebuzaradan and his forces
Archaeomagnetic tools allowed us to reconstruct the site formation processes and show that many segments of a thick surface found inside a recently excavated debris layer had originally been the floor of a monumental structure
Summary
Archaeomagnetism, the application of paleomagnetic methods to archaeological materials, is interdisciplinary in its methods and in its impact. Well-dated archaeological materials are a critical data source for geomagnetic secular variation models [1,2,3,4,5,6], which are used to explore the dynamic structure of Earth’s core [7, 8], the rates of cosmogenic isotope production in the atmosphere [9,10,11] and the possible effect of geomagnetism on climate [11,12,13]. In the archaeological research of the Levant, the growing body of archaeomagnetic data [19,20,21] enables an increasingly reliable dating method [22,23,24]. Archaeomagnetism can provide a powerful tool for reconstructing site formation processes [26,27,28,29]
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