From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Thu Oct 25 2007 - 05:39:02 PDT
>From: Cornell Chronicle Online <cunews_at_cornell.edu>
>Reply-To: Cornell Chronicle Online <cunews_at_cornell.edu>
>To: CUNEWS-CAMPUS-L_at_cornell.edu
>Subject: Cornell Chronicle: Tree rings rewrite history
>Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 20:19:55 -0400
>
>Chronicle Online e-News
>
>How old trees and ancient wood are helping rewrite history explained by
>tree-ring lab director
>http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Oct07/ManningTrustees.kr.html
>
>Oct. 24, 2007
>
>By Krishna Ramanujan
>ksr32_at_cornell.edu
>
>Cornell archaeologists are rewriting history with the help of tree rings
>from 900-year-old trees, wood found on ancient buildings and through
>analysis of the isotopes (especially radiocarbon dating) and chemistry they
>can find in that wood.
>
>By collecting thousands of years worth of overlapping tree rings, with each
>ring representing a tree's annual growth, the researchers have created
>long-term records in the eastern Mediterranean that allow them to precisely
>date such seminal milestones in history as when Hammurabi, "the law-giver,"
>reigned, when the massive Santorini volcanic eruption occurred, and the
>timelines of the Bronze and Iron ages, as well as many more recent events.
>
>Sturt Manning, director of the Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for
>Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology at Cornell, summarized his work
>for Cornell council members and trustees, Oct. 19 in Statler Hall.
>Dendrochronology is the science of comparing growth patterns in tree trunks
>to date past events or climate changes. Cornell's dendrochronology
>laboratory now holds more than 40,000 tree-ring samples, including many
>from the eastern Mediterranean.
>
>Trees of the same species from the same geographical area have fairly
>similar ring patterns, Manning said, because they are exposed to similar
>climatic conditions. By starting with living trees and then finding samples
>from slightly older trees used in buildings and still older trees from more
>ancient sites, archaeologists have been able to overlap tree-ring data to
>create chronologies that date back thousands of years.
>
>Radiocarbon dating, statistical analysis, researchers' trained eyes and
>prior knowledge of events in the area are then used to match new samples
>with tree-ring chronologies from the same area. Manning and his staff in
>the lab have used such techniques to verify, for example, the likely
>origins of a Circle of Rembrandt painting (referring to an elite group of
>students that worked directly with the artist). He showed that the oak
>board of the painting came from the same tree as the board of another
>painting, whose origins are known and which hangs in a museum in Krakow,
>Poland.
>
>Similarly, scholars have debated for more than 150 years about the dates of
>the ancient civilizations of the Babylonians, the Assyrians and the
>lifetime of Hammurabi, the Babylonian king who helped create the oldest set
>of written laws. Mainstream scholars have proposed dates for his reign that
>differ by 300 years.
>
>"You can't do history if you have a difference of 300 years or so," said
>Manning. "That would place George Washington as a contemporary of some
>person living right now. ... You'd get entirely the wrong historical
>reconstruction if you didn't have the dates sorted out."
>
>Using ancient beams from palaces of known contemporaries of Hammurabi,
>Cornell researchers combined radiocarbon dating techniques with
>dendrochronological evidence to date Hammurabi to around 1792 B.C., Manning
>said.
>
>Similar techniques used on wood buried beneath volcanic ash allowed Manning
>and others to date the Santorini volcanic eruption, one of the largest in
>the last 10,000 years, as most likely occurring in the late 17th century
>B.C., 100 years earlier than previously believed. The discovery may rewrite
>the late Bronze Age history of Mediterranean civilizations, he said.
>
>--
>
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