Dark Bilious Vapors

Continuing with another part from “Collapse” by Jared Diamond about Paleoarchaeology and the incredibly weird and amazing science used to determine the characteristics and conditions of these past places and observations about what probably led to their demise.

Here are another of the fascinating information gathering and dating techniques: Dendrochronology. Click on the “more” button to read further.


Dendrochronology:

Our understanding of southwestern prehistory [Anasazi] is detailed because of two advantages that archaeologists in this area enjoy. One is the packrat middens…The other advantage allows archaeologist to date building sites to the nearest year by the tree rings of the site’s wooden construction beams, instead of having to rely on the radiocarbon method used by archaeologists elsewhere, with its’ inevitable errors of 50 to 100 years.

Here’s how tree ring dating, known to scientists as dendrochronology (from the Greek roots dendron = tree, and chronos = time), works. If you cut a tree down today, it’s straightforward to count the rings inwards, starting from the tree’s outside (corresponding to this year’s growth ring), and thereby to state that the 177th ring from the ourtermost one towards the center was laid down in the year 2005 minus 177, or 1828. But it’s less straightforward to attach a date to a particular ring in an ancient Anasazi wooden beam , because at first you don’t know in what year the beam was cut. However, the widths of tree growth rings vary from year to year, depending on the rain or drought conditions in each year.

Hence the sequence of the rings in a tree cross-section is like a message in Morse code formerly used for sending telegraph messages; dot-dot-dash-dot-dash in the Morse code, wide-wide-narrow-wide-narrow in the tree ring sequence. Actually the tree ring sequence is even more diagnostic and richer in information than the Morse code, because trees actually contain rings spanning many different width, rather than the Morse code choice between dot or dash.

Tree ring specialists (known as dendrochronologists) proceed by noting the sequence of wider and narrower rings in a tree cut down in a known recent year, and also noting the sequences in beams from trees cut down at various times in the past. They then match up and align the tree ring sequences with the same diagnostic wide/narrow patterns from different beams.
…
In that way, dendrochronologists have constructed tree ring records extending back for thousands of years in some parts of the world. Each record is valid for a geographic area whose extent depends on local weather patterns, because weather and hence tree growth patterns vary with location. For instance, the basic tree ring chronology of the American Southwest applies (with some variation) to the area from Northern Mexico to Wyoming.

A bonus of dendrochronology is that the width and substructure of each ring reflects the amount of rain and the season at which the rain fell during that particular year. Thus, tree ring studies also allow one to reconstruct the past climate, e.g., a series of wide rings means a very wet period, and a series of narrow rings means a drought. Tree rings thereby provide southwestern archaeologists with uniquely exact dating and uniquely detailed year to year environmental information.

Karen on 08.12.05 @ 06:12 AM CST