Cornell Tree-Ring Laboratory

• Aegean and Near East
• North America
• Dendrochemistry
• Dendro Data Standards

Aegean Dendrochronology Project

Our key long-range goal is to build long multi-millennial scale tree-ring chronologies in the Aegean and Near East that will extend from the present to the early Holocene to cover, broadly speaking, the last 10,000 years of human and environmental history. Our raison d'être is to provide a dating method for the study of history and prehistory in the Aegean that is accurate to the year. This kind of precision has, up to now, been lacking in ancient studies of this area. Indeed, few archaeological problems stimulate as much rancor as chronology, especially that of the Eastern Mediterranean. The work of the Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology Project aims to help to bring some kind of rational and neutral order to Aegean and Near Eastern chronology from the Neolithic to the present.

We also aim to provide a fundamental climate and environmental studies resource for a region which was the cradle of a number of civilizations central to human history from the origins of agriculture through to the Classical period, the Medieval period, and beyond.

To date, more than 10 million tree-ring measurements have led to the compilation of chronologies covering (but not wholly covering) some 9,000 years. Our aim is to fill in the gaps. See our bargraph to get an idea of the time periods covered. The most difficult periods for us are the first half millennium B.C. and the first millennium A.D. If you have relevant samples, please contact us!

Sample of Gordion 3 timber (Juniper) from the Midas Mound Tumulus, Turkey

Oak samples from Northern Turkey

Southern Levant Dendrochronology Project

The Southern Levant Dendrochronology Project (SLDP) is a lab sub-project started in 2007 as part of lab member Brita Lorentzen's PhD thesis with the aim of building up the database of dendrochronologically dated timbers from sites in the southern Levant (i.e. southern Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt) and building long-term chronologies for species native to the southern Levant.

The first phase of this project has involved sampling and building chronologies from Pinus halepensis trees growing in modern forest sites situated along rough north-south and east-west transects in the southern Levant in order to investigate their response to climate and examine variability in the tree-ring record. When we compare correlations among Pinus halepensis and Pinus brutia chronologies that we and other researchers have built from eastern Mediterranean forest sites, it is clear that northeastern (Turkey, Cyprus, and Syria) and southeastern (Israel and Jordan) Mediterranean sites form two distinct tree-ring signals, with a transition zone located in Lebanon. It is therefore necessary that we build separate chronologies of species native to the southern Levant if we are to date timbers procured from this region successfully. (Timbers from the northern Levant may be crossdated against our pre-existing chronological networks.) Building up the tree-ring database in the southern Levant will also allow us potentially to provenance timbers more precisely (i.e., indicate whether samples were procured from the southern or northern Levant) and provide information on long-term climate and environmental trends in the region.

Sample contribution from archaeologists and historians working in the southern Levant is critical to the project’s success, so please contact either Brita Lorentzen or Sturt Manning if you have any relevant samples. We are interested in wood samples from Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon from the present back to the early Holocene. This may include archaeological charcoal; timbers from historic buildings or other monuments; shipwrecks; old trees from forestry, construction, or other work; and subfossil trees. Suitable tree species include pine, cedar, juniper, and deciduous oak. Please note that olive, acacia, and tamarisk cannot be dated. (See our submitting samples page for more information.)