I've been a big fan of archaeology ever since I discovered the ancient Egyptians back in grade school. Indiana Jones aside, I think it's absolutely fascinating that we can dig up the remains of civilizations from centuries ago, put the pieces back together (mostly), and get a glimpse into those long-ago lives.

But there's the big question: Exactly how long ago did it all happen?

First of all, there's the issue that the ancient world as a whole is terribly remote from us. It's easy to lump everything BCE into one large mental category without trying to sort it out. But that leads to trouble, since the different cultures and societies didn't all happen at the same time.

The Minoans, for instance, are clearly a pre-Greek, non-Indo-European culture that later came in contact with the Mycenaean Greeks. I like to put them in their historical context alongside the Egyptians, Sumerians, and others who lived during that time period.

We can pretty easily sort out which cultures came before or after others. That's not terribly difficult, what with the layers of remains the archaeologists dig up.

A bigger problem is absolute dating: figuring out the exact year to label something with. Why is this such a contentious issue?

Partly, it stems from the fact that archaeology wasn't originally a science, not really. It was the hobby (albeit a really enthusiastic one) of wealthy Christian men whose main aim was to prove the historicity of the events in the Bible. So the "baseline" of archaeological dating is the assumed dates, based on the Bible stories, of certain dynasties and kings in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. And that's the real problem.

We know now that the world is far older than Irish Archbishop Rev. James Ussher calculated based on the Bible. The problem is that, even though archaeology has progressed into a real and reliable science, much of the dating is still based on those 19th-century biblical calculations.

For instance, for many years the eruption of the volcanic island of Santorini, known as Thera in the ancient world, was dated to about 1450 BCE. It was assumed to have been the cause of the fall of Minoan civilization, since it created a huge tsunami in the eastern Mediterranean as well as doing damage via earthquakes and a drifting ash cloud. But it turns out that the eruption happened much earlier, and the Minoans managed to recover from it.

Dendrochronology and ice core dating now put the eruption of Thera to somewhere between 1646 and 1590 BCE. These are much more accurate methods than the carbon-14 dating that has been popular for years, and obviously also far more accurate than relative dating based on the presumed times of biblical incidents.

So the eruption of Thera didn't destroy Minoan civilization. It killed a lot of people, severely damaged the cities on the eastern and northern coasts of Crete, and put a serious damper on the island's society for 50 or maybe even 100 years afterward, as they slowly rebuilt.

Then they had to deal with the Mycenaean occupation of Knossos, which led to the destruction of most of the Minoan cities by either the Mycenaeans or their hired mercenaries in around 1450 BCE. So yes, the Minoan cities fell at that time (all except Knossos, which was destroyed about a century later) but their destruction wasn't due to the Thera eruption.

The debris layer from the tsunami is pretty spectacular, as archaeologist Sandy Macgillivray has shown with his excavations at Palaikastro on the far eastern tip of Crete. But the Thera eruption wasn't the end of Minoan civilization, and we wouldn't know that if we hadn't developed these newer dating methods.

This kind of information always causes an uproar in the scientific community, when people who have built their careers on the older information scramble to hold onto power. But eventually the newer data wins out.

I like to find out what really happened, even if it doesn't line up with someone's religious text or their preconceived notions. I think we owe that much to these marvelous ancient cultures. They were living, breathing people just like us.