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Morning Open Thread. Archaeology and Dendrochronology. [1]

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Date: 2023-03-11

"Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been." --Jim Bishop

I wrote this for The Daily Bucket some time back. It’s worth a revisit.

Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum. This is a post where you can come to share what’s on your mind and stay for the expansion. The diarist is on California time and gets to take a nap when he needs to, or may just wander off and show up again later. So you know, it’s a feature, not a bug. Grab you supportive indulgence(s) of choice and join us, please. And if you’re brand new to Morning Open Thread, the Hail and Well Met, new Friend.

National Geographic:

Environmental archaeologists help us understand the environmental conditions that influenced people in the past. Sometimes, environmental archaeology is called human paleoecology. Environmental archaeologists discovered that the expansion of the Taquara/Itararé people of the Brazilian highlands is closely linked with the expansion of the evergreen forest there. The forest grew as the climate became wetter. As the forest provided more resources to the Taquara/Itararé people (timber, as well as plants and animals that depended on the evergreen trees), they were able to expand their territory.

If I’d been born in another life I would have been an archaeologist. One of my most-watched YouTube video series is Time Team. I have learned a lot from watching that show (it ran for twenty years, so there’s a lot of episodes). Although archaeology focuses on human history, culture and technology, it brings out a lot about human interaction with the natural world. From archaeology we can learn which plants and animals were around in which places in the past (all the more important for where they no longer exist today), and what the climate, topography, and geology were like and how they have changed dramatically through the ages, both from wholly natural causes and man-made causes.

One of my favorite archaeological finds came from Sutton Hoo, the Anglo-Saxon ship burial as portrayed in the movie The Dig (on Netflix). These drinking horns are from an auroch, “an extinct species of large wild cattle that inhabited Asia, Europe, and North Africa. It is the ancestor of domestic cattle. The species survived in Europe until 1627, when the last recorded aurochs died in the Jaktorów Forest, Poland.” [Wikipedia].

Although aurochs were still surviving up until 1627, they were long gone from Britain by that time, having gone extinct during the Bronze Age. They were finally wiped out by “unrestricted hunting, a narrowing of habitat due to the development of farming, and diseases transmitted by domesticated cattle.” [Wikipedia]

Dendrochronology is another fascinating connection to nature that archaeology often brings forth. Dating is crucially important to the science of archaeology, and by using dendrochronology not only can archaeologists discover things like climate conditions for their site they can sometimes pin down the date of a site to an exact year, which I find incredible.

Wikipedia: Dendrochronology (or tree-ring dating) is the scientific method of dating tree rings (also called growth rings) to the exact year they were formed. As well as dating them this can give data for dendroclimatology, the study of climate and atmospheric conditions during different periods in history from wood. Dendrochronology derives from Ancient Greek dendron (δένδρον), meaning "tree", khronos (χρόνος), meaning "time", and -logia (-λογία), "the study of".[1] Dendrochronology is useful for determining the precise age of samples, especially those that are too recent for radiocarbon dating, which always produces a range rather than an exact date. However, for a precise date of the death of the tree a full sample to the edge is needed, which most trimmed timber will not provide. It also gives data on the timing of events and rates of change in the environment (most prominently climate) and also in wood found in archaeology or works of art and architecture, such as old panel paintings. It is also used as a check in radiocarbon dating to calibrate radiocarbon ages.[2] New growth in trees occurs in a layer of cells near the bark. A tree's growth rate changes in a predictable pattern throughout the year in response to seasonal climate changes, resulting in visible growth rings. Each ring marks a complete cycle of seasons, or one year, in the tree's life.[2] As of 2020, securely dated tree-ring data for the northern hemisphere are available going back 12,310 years.[3] A new method is based on measuring variations in oxygen isotopes in each ring, and this 'isotope dendrochronology' can yield results on samples which are not suitable for traditional dendrochronology due to too few or too similar rings.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/11/2153983/-Morning-Open-Thread-Archaeology-and-Dendrochronology

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