The LIAA evolution in the Mediterranean.

Abstract:

The magnitude and origin of the Levantine Iron Age Anomaly (LIAA), dated around 1000 BCE, are not yet well understood. Recent archeomagnetic studies from the Levant and Western Europe suggest a western drift of this feature, stressing the importance of investigating its temporal and spatial behavior of this event over the Central Mediterranean. In this perspective, we first provide new archeointensity data from Greece and Italy covering the first millennium BCE and then, we further establish a global vision of the LIAA (from Mexico to Japan) by comparing all the available data of the GEOMAGIA50v3.3 database compilation updated with recent publications including the new data presented here. Moreover, in order to screen out unreliable results, a set of selection criteria has been applied to the compiled dataset. To perform the global analysis, we calculated paleosecular variation curves in different regions from the Mediterranean and central Asia and we presentHovmöller diagrams of the archeointensity information as a function of the geographic longitude and time. Our results suggest that the source of the LIAA is located in the Levantine region vanishing to the north, the west and the east, where lower virtual axial dipole moments (VADM) are observed. In addition, our results show a high intensity feature around 500 BCE, associated to lower VADM values than the LIAA. Such feature seems to be present all over Europe, from the Canary Islands to Turkey, with similar VADM values in the different regions, while it is not clearly identified in Asia.