Skip to main content




History and Supporters

The Aegean Dendrochronology Project which began in 1973 in the basement of the Ankara Museum, and then the Dendro Lab at Cornell (still in a basement), were both founded and created by Peter Ian Kuniholm (Professor Emeritus).

After three decades at the helm, Peter retired in 2006. Sturt Manning became the new Director of the Laboratory from July 2006, and is also Goldwin Smith Professor of Classical Archaeology in the Department of Classics at Cornell.

Today the Cornell Lab holds some 40,000 dendro samples which it has measured and studied, and actively continues work building and studying long robust tree-ring chronologies for the Mediterranean and Near East from the present day back as far as possible.

The Cornell Tree-Ring Laboratory has gratefully received support from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Malcolm H. Wiener Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, The Social Sciences and Hunanities Research Council, Canada, and individual Patrons of the Aegean Dendrochronology Project.

Work on the Southern Levant is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant 1219315. Work in southern Turkey and the Levant is supported by the CRANE project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada.