A07_P02

Radiocarbon dating of the Church of St. Margaret of Antioch in Kopčany (Slovakia): International consortium results

Povinec P¹, Kontuľ I¹, Cherkinsky A², Hajdas I³, Gu Y^3,4, Jull A^5,6,7, Lupták T⁸, Mihály M⁶, Steier P⁹, Svetlik I¹⁰

¹Comenius University, Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics , Bratislava, Slovakia, ²University of Georgia, Center for Applied Isotope Studies, Athens, USA, ³ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, ⁴Nanjing University, School of Geography and Ocean Science, Nanjing, China, ⁵University of Arizona, Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory, Tucson, USA, ⁶Institute for Nuclear Research, INTERACT Centre, Debrecen, Hungary, ⁷University of Arizona, Department of Geosciences, Tucson, USA, ⁸Restauro, s.r.o., Bratislava, Slovakia, ⁹University of Vienna, VERA Laboratory, Vienna, Austria, ¹⁰Czech Academy of Sciences, Nuclear Physics Institute, Prague, Czech Republic

An international consortium of radiocarbon laboratories was established to date the origin of the Church of St. Margaret of Antioch in Kopčany (Slovakia), because its age was not well established in previous investigations. Altogether, 19 samples of wood, charcoal, mortar and plaster were analyzed. The ¹⁴C results obtained from the different laboratories as well as between the different sample types were in reasonably agreement, resulting in a ¹⁴C calibrated age of 780–870 AD (94% probability) for the Church. Although the ¹⁴C results have very good precision, the specific plateau-shape of the calibration curve in this period caused the wide range of the calibrated age. The probability distribution from OxCal calibration shows, however, that about 80% of the probability distribution lies in the period before 863 AD, implying that the Church could have been constructed before the arrival of Constantine (St. Cyril) and St. Methodius to Great Moravia. The Church thus represents, together with the St. Georges’s Rotunda in Nitrianska Blatnica, probably the oldest standing purpose-built Christian church in the eastern part of Central Europe.