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Overheard a professor say dendrochronology is just counting tree rings. Took that personally.
I was at a coffee shop near the university last week and this archaeology lecturer was complaining to his student about how people dumb down his field. He said something like 'dendrochronology is just counting tree rings' and laughed. But honestly that stuck with me because it's actually a really cool method. I looked it up after and found out they match ring patterns from old wood to a master timeline going back thousands of years. Like in the Southwest US they dated Puebloan structures using beams from the 1200s with exact year accuracy. That's way more than just counting. Has anyone here actually worked with tree ring dating on a dig or seen it done in person?
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the_barbara14d ago
Oh come on, that professor was being way too dismissive! @williamd70 you hit on something real with that stump counting thing because it sounds easy until you actually try it. But dendrochronology isn't just about tallying up rings one by one like some kind of tree ring bingo. They cross date patterns between different samples to find matches that can stretch back thousands of years, and they have to account for things like false rings from droughts or narrow rings from fires. That takes real skill and knowledge of local climate history. I've seen a dendrochronologist give a talk on dating a shipwreck from the 1600s using leftover timber from a collapsed barn, and she explained how they matched the oak rings against a master sequence for the region. It's not brain surgery but it's way more than just counting, and I don't see why people feel the need to mock a perfectly good science.
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You ever stare at a stump and try to count the rings for fun only to lose track at like ring 47? That's how I got into it, respect the science behind it though.
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