Dendrochronological Dating of Wood from the Fountain of Youth Park Archaeological Site (8SJ31), St. Augustine, Florida, U.S.A

Abstract

Settled in 1565 by the Pedro Menéndez de Aviles expedition, St. Augustine, Florida, holds great educational, historical, and anthropological interest for current researchers as the oldest continuously occupied European community in the continental United States. Archaeological excavations produced two large (ca. 20 cm diameter) posts from the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park site. Our objective in this project was to use tree-ring dating to determine the outermost dates of the two posts and to use these dates to assist archaeological interpretations. Sample 8SJ31-2741 was pine and contained tree rings that were successfully crossdated using the Lake Louise reference chronology from southern Georgia to AD 1620-1668. Sample 8SJ31-2766 was a cypress sample that we could not crossdate using a nearby reference chronology from the Altamaha River in southern Georgia. The date for sample 8SJ31-2741 places its cutting and deposition within the Mission Period occupation and verifies that the Nombre de Dios mission village was still active and building after 1668 into the late 17th Century. Furthermore, the dendrochronological date confirmed the stratigraphic interpretation, suggesting that disturbance of the upper layers of the surface in this part of the site was perhaps not as disruptive to the soils as originally assumed. This project demonstrates the feasibility of dating wood extracted from sites from the historic Spanish-era period in the Southeastern US.

The Longleaf Tree-Ring Network: Reviewing and expanding the utility of Pinus palustris Mill. Dendrochronological data

“…However, despite the extensive use of longleaf pine in construction, the species remains underrepresented in dendroarchaeology studies. At present, only seven peer-reviewed studies have dated historical structures containing longleaf pine timbers that include six dwellings and one crib dam (Van De Gevel et al, 2009;Grissino-Mayer et al, 2010;Garland et al, 2012;Harley et al, 2017aHarley et al, , 2018Leland et al, 2021;Patterson et al, 2021). This collection excludes unpublished theses, dissertations, and gray literature, such as technical reports from commercial dendroarchaeology performed by the Oxford Tree-Ring Laboratory.…”

“…Several important themes emerge from the published literature. First, all but one study (Leland et al, 2021) used reference chronologies that are not publicly available, such as those from Eglin Air Force Base, Florida (Harley et al, 2018), Lake Louise, Georgia (Grissino-Mayer et al, 2010; Garland et al, 2012), DeSoto National Forest, Mississippi (Harley et al, 2017a; Patterson et al, 2021), and Hope Mills, North Carolina (Van De Gevel et al, 2009). Second, dendroarchaeological dating of historical longleaf pine timbers has relied on a relatively small number of long reference chronologies that are not yet publicly available.…”

“…Two of these chronologies, Jeffries Smokehouse in North Carolina (Barefoot 1996) and the Terminal Warehouse in New York (Leland et al, 2021), are from archaeological collections. Between these datasets are large spatial data gaps; many historical structures that may be identified for future study will be hundreds of kilometers away from the nearest available reference chronology (Figure 3, ITRDB chronologies, e.g., Garland et al, 2012). Temporal data gaps are also a limitation to dating historical longleaf pine timbers.…”

Latewood Ring Width Reveals CE 1734 Felling Dates for Walker House Timbers in Tupelo, Mississippi, USA

“…These harvest dates establish an earliest possible date of construction and provide evidence to estimate the true age of a structure [1]. Precision dating of historic structures in the southeastern United States (US) has flourished in the last decade [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Within this region, the Gulf Coastal Plain remains under-represented aside from three published studies [12][13][14].…”