Dendrochronology and Radiocarbon Dating

Abstract

Both dendrochronology and radiocarbon (14C) dating have their roots back in the early to mid-1900s. Although they were independently developed, they began to intertwine in the 1950s when the founder of dendrochronology, A. E. Douglass, provided dated wood samples for Willard Libby to test his emerging 14C methods. Since this early connection, absolutely dated tree-rings have been key to calibration of the Holocene portion of the 14C timescale. In turn, 14C dating of non-calendar-dated tree-rings has served to place those samples more precisely in time, advance development of long tree-ring chronologies, and bring higher resolution to earlier portions of the 14C calibration curve. Together these methods continue to shape and improve chronological frameworks across the globe, answering questions in archaeology, history, paleoclimatology, geochronology, and ocean, atmosphere, and solar sciences.

Dendrocronología: datación de materiales, formas y eventos a través de los anillos de los árboles

“…Aunque se desarrollaron de forma independiente, ambos métodos comenzaron a entrelazarse en la década de 1950, cuando se proporcionaron muestras de madera datadas por dendrocronología para probar los métodos emergentes de 14 C. Así, comparando las dataciones estimadas por radiocarbono y las más precisas dendrocronológicas, se han podido modelizar las oscilaciones de la concentración de este isótopo en la atmósfera, que no es estable a lo largo del tiempo como se pensaba, sino que varía -entre otros muchos factores-a causa de la frecuencia e intensidad de las erupciones volcánicas, las oscilaciones de la actividad solar, las fluctuaciones en el momento geomagnético de la tierra, o las explosiones nucleares a cielo abierto y fugas radiactivas, en estos últimos casos como consecuencia de la actividad antrópica. De manera que actualmente son los anillos de los árboles fechados absolutamente la clave para la calibración de la datación radiocarbónica (Pearson et al, 2021).…”

Developing millennial tree-ring chronology for Turku (Åbo) and comparing palaeoclimaticsignals inferred from archaeological, subfossil and living Pinus sylvestris datain Southwest Finland

“…Tree growth patterns reflect climatic and environmental changes with annual precision and accuracy (Fritts, 1976;Baillie, 1995). Compared to other methods available to date wood materials, based on 14 C (Hajdas et al, 2021;Pearson et al, 2022) or molecular decay (Tintner et al, 2020), tree-ring dates come with annual resolution and without uncertainties. The dating issue also concerns the special case of 14 C dating by wiggle matching (Wacker et al, 2014;Kuitems et al, 2022), which actually requires precise high-resolution materials such as tree rings to work ideally.…”

DATING OF WOODEN HERITAGE OBJECTS IN THE GLIWICE 14C AND MASS SPECTROMETRY LABORATORY

“…Dendrochronology, derived from wood biology, is the science whose primary task is the dating of wood (Ważny 2001). Radiocarbon ( 14 C) dating and dendrochronology have been linked since the first steps of the 14 C method, and the history of this symbiosis was recently reviewed by Pearson et al (2022). From the radiocarbon perspective, tree rings investigations enabled the reconstruction of past 14 C content necessary for calibration of radiocarbon dates (Reimer et al 2020;van der Plicht et al 2020;Hua et al 2022), provided the insight into the carbon cycle on the Earth (e.g., Levin and Hesshaimer 2000) and delivered data on changing astronomical variables such as cosmic ray intensity (Miyake et al 2012).…”