Facilitating tree-ring dating of historic conifer timbers using Blue Intensity (original) (raw)
2017, Journal of Archaeological Science
Dendroarchaeology almost exclusively uses ring-width (RW) data for dating historical structures and artefacts. Such data can be used to date tree-ring sequences when regional climate dominates RW variability. However, the signal in RW data can be obscured due to site specific ecological influences (natural and anthropogenic) that impact crossdating success. In this paper, using data from Scotland, we introduce a novel tree-ring parameter (Blue Intensity-BI) and explore its utility for facilitating dendrohistorical dating of conifer samples. BI is similar to latewood density as they both reflect the combined hemicellulose, cellulose and lignin content in the latewood cell walls of conifer species and the amount of these compounds is strongly controlled, at least for trees growing in temperature limited locations, by late summer temperatures. BI not only expresses a strong climate signal, but is also less impacted by site specific ecological influences. It can be concurrently produced with RW data from images of finely sanded conifer samples but at a significantly reduced cost compared to traditional latewood density. Our study shows that the probability of successfully crossdating historical samples is greatly increased using BI compared to RW. Furthermore, due to the large spatial extent of the summer temperature signal expressed by such data, a sparse multi-species conifer network of long BI chronologies across Europe could be used to date and loosely provenance imported material. Keywords Tree-ring dating; dendroarchaeology; Blue Intensity; conifers 1. Introduction Dendrochronology is multidisciplinary in nature and has many applications in the environmental sciences including ecology, geomorphology and climatology (Schweingruber 1996; Hughes et al. 2010; Speer 2010; Stoffel et al. 2010). The common fundamental keystone to all dendrochronological subdisciplines is the ability to ensure exact calendar dating of the tree-ring (TR) series. Crossdating is the ability to pattern-match or synchronise TR sequences between samples of the same species across a climatically homogenous region to allow the identification of the exact year in which a particular TR was formed (Stokes and Smiley 1968; Fritts 1976). One of the earliest uses of dendrochronological methods was the dating of historical structures and artefacts (so-called dendroarchaeology) and a large body of published
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