Does anyone know how far back archaeologists can date things with dendrochronology (history of climate recorded by tree rings)?
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dendrochronology
Started by
Siara
, Jul 13 2007 02:17 PM
4 replies to this topic
#1
Siara
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Posted 13 July 2007 - 02:17 PM
#2
Raptor
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Posted 13 July 2007 - 02:40 PM
You can go back however old the tree is. The oldest living tree is a bristlecone pine (?), which is almost 5000 years old.
#3
BlueZone
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Posted 13 July 2007 - 04:10 PM
I think you can go further back than the tree.... for example if you have a 200 year old tree truck it might be that the first 50 rings would coincide with the last 50 rings of a tree that lived from 400 years ago to 150 years ago. In other words, it seems like they should be able to overlap trees.
What they need is a 5,000 year old tree and another tree which lived from 10.000 to 4,900 years ago. I don't know how old the oldest wood artifacts are. They find incredibly old wooden objects in Chinese tombs.
#4
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Posted 13 July 2007 - 04:53 PM
Quote
I think you can go further back than the tree.... for example if you have a 200 year old tree truck it might be that the first 50 rings would coincide with the last 50 rings of a tree that lived from 400 years ago to 150 years ago. In other words, it seems like they should be able to overlap trees.
Quite possible ... the only problem is that the chronology would be lost unless you had a complete section of the tree.
The procedure in that case would be to Carbon date it, which would give us the date of the tree's demise and go from there.
What is questionable is if the data preserved in that tree would still be accurate, wood is hygroscopic and can have absorbed all kinds of foreign matter during that time.
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#5
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Posted 16 July 2007 - 05:18 AM
Quote
Quite possible ... the only problem is that the chronology would be lost unless you had a complete section of the tree.
The procedure in that case would be to Carbon date it, which would give us the date of the tree's demise and go from there.
What is questionable is if the data preserved in that tree would still be accurate, wood is hygroscopic and can have absorbed all kinds of foreign matter during that time.
The procedure in that case would be to Carbon date it, which would give us the date of the tree's demise and go from there.
What is questionable is if the data preserved in that tree would still be accurate, wood is hygroscopic and can have absorbed all kinds of foreign matter during that time.
They overlap, but I believe the oldest overlaps done with any accuracy are 10,000 years. There are many other dating techniques that can go much farther back, like; K-Ar dating, thorium-230 dating, Fission track dating etc
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