Over the past decade there has been a burgeoning in the publication of
C14 dates for the Southern Levant for the cultural periods known as
Chalcolithic and EB.  It seems to me that there is some kind of serious
problem with too many of the dates to be explained by mere human errors.
My dealing especially with EB I dates shows them to be almost
consistently too early by several centuries.  This is somehow always
explained by wood from trees that are several hundreds of years older
than the archaeological contexts they were recovered in but I am
beginning to wonder about this.  Most recently I have discussed the
dating of EB I derived samples from a northern site in Israel and was
surprised to hear that the excavator would like to push back the
beginning of this period to ca. 3700 BC.  Conventional wisdom seems to
suggest that this period was far longer than suspected by the
archaeological community several decades ago and to this I agree,
although trying to fill a time span of ca 500 years is difficult given
the archaeological record and the sequences we have for EB I.  Anything
longer seems to me to be unreasonable in the extreme.
        As an anchoring date (although itself flexible) is the reign of
Narmer of end of Dynasty O or 1st king of Dynasty 1 that, according to
all the chronologies high and low I know place that venerable gentleman
between 3150 to 2950 BC.  If that is correct then we have a real problem
in stretching out EB I to place its beginnings ca 3700.
        I am asking in all seriousness whether or not there is some sort
of anomaly in the scientific aspects of C14 dating that might account for
a consistent error that would explain some of the dates.  I would ask
people to consult their favorite C14 lab person for advice on this.
        Please do not take this communication as an attack on C14
dating or as a suggestion that I reject a well founded scientific
approach.  I merely suggest that it is producing problematic results that
cannot be easily disregarded.  Perhaps conventional wisdom is wrong and
the period is longer than I believe.  However, I ask you to take a good,
long, hard look at the Stuiver and Reimner 1993 (RADIOCARBON 35, p.
215-230) method of calibrating, including one and TWO Sigmas, before
rushing off to conclude that I am a crank.  I really feel that this
problem that I encounter needs addressing.  A good list of dates for this
period is Isaac Gilead's latest article in BASOR 296, p. 1.  This gives
one aspect of the problem.  It places entire cultural periods into a
chronological scheme while entirely ignoring other culture bound and
stratigrapich contexts of the Chalcolithic-EB I horizons.
Eliot Braun at the Israel Antiquities Authority