Estratigrafía y radiocarbono: la tumba 1 y la cronología de la ocupación argárica del Tabayá (Aspe, Alicante).

Abstract

The discovery and implementation of radiocarbon dating, from the middle of the 20th century, was a transcendental milestone for archaeological research. Its technical development over the last decades has expanded, to extremes difficult to imagine not long ago, the possibilities of addressing historical chronological problems from the analysis of archaeological contexts. However, during this time it has also been shown that, for these purposes, the usefulness of the 14C dates not only depends on the reliability of the contexts of provenance of the dated samples. Acceptance of their validity as an archaeological data will depends also on its coherence with the rest of the available information. In this paper, we present a critical assessment of the radiocarbon dating obtained up to this moment in the Tabaya site (Aspe, Alicante), relating to its Argaric occupation, and the arguments that have led us to consider as invalid two of them, taken from the tomb 1. Both show serious inconsistencies in relation to the recorded stratigraphy and to the dates obtained for the tomb 3. Finally, a relative chronology is proposed for the tomb 1 of the Tabaya from the radiocarbon dates of infirmed levels to this one, and tomb 3, as well as stratigraphic data that relate both tombs.