Neolithic Italy at 4004 BC: people and places

Skeates, R.

Neolithic Italy at 4004 BC: people and places

Skeates, R.

Authors

Professor Robin Skeates robin.skeates@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Contributors

R. Whitehouse
Editor

M. Pearce
Editor

Abstract

According to James Ussher, the creation of the world began on Sunday 23rd October, in the year 4004 BC (Ussher 1658). Ussher (1581–1656) was the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh in northern Ireland, and he deduced this date from his interpretation of the Old Testament, as a contribution to the long-running Christian theological debate on the age and history of the Earth (Barr 1985; Ford 2007). His creation date of 4004 BC was widely accepted in England in the eighteenth century, particularly when it was included in annotated editions of the influential King James Bible, although it was increasingly rejected by geologists and theologians in the nineteenth century, and is now a classic date remembered by historians of archaeology (e.g. Daniel 1975: 27), not to mention American creationists. For my purposes, it is also a convenient date upon which to base an experiment to establish what we can (and cannot) say about Neolithic Italy at a very specific point in time, focussing on the archaeological data from a sample of radiocarbon dated sites, whilst not ignoring the long-term trends with which archaeology is usually concerned.

Citation

Skeates, R. (2013). Neolithic Italy at 4004 BC: people and places

Publication Date	Oct 1, 2013
Deposit Date	Mar 9, 2012
Publicly Available Date	Oct 10, 2013
Series Title	Accordia Research Papers
Publisher URL	http://dro.dur.ac.uk/11425