To put a cedar ship in a bottle: Dendroprovenancing three ancient East Mediterranean watercraft with the 87Sr/86Sr isotope ratio

Rich, Sara A.; Manning, Sturt W.; Degryse, Patrick; Vanhaecke, Frank; Latruwe, Kris; Lerberghe, Karel Van

doi:10.1016/j.jasrep.2016.08.034

Cited by 11 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…While a large number of studies have focussed on measuring Sr isotopes in archeological human and animal remains (e.g., Price et al, 2006;Bentley, 2013;Laffoon et al, 2014) or charred/carbonized grains (e.g., Benson et al, 2010; though not always successfullysee Styring et al, 2019), as well as on modern plants to establish a biologically available Sr baseline (e.g., Evans et al, 2010;Snoeck et al, 2016Snoeck et al, , 2020, less has been done with archeological wood remains. Exceptions include a study of the well-preserved desiccated structural timbers at Chaco Canyon (English et al, 2001), and of desiccated prehistoric willow and tule textiles in the Great Basin (Benson et al, 2006), as well as some more recent work on pre-Columbian wood sculptures from Florida (Ostapkowicz et al, 2017a) and Trinidad (Ostapkowicz et al, 2017b), waterlogged shipwrecks (Rich et al, 2016;Hajj et al, 2017;Van Ham-Meert et al, 2020), and South American/Lesser Antillean wooden clubs from museum collections (Ostapkowicz et al, 2018). Little targeted research has focused on pretreatments for archeological wood.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing Various Pre-treatments on Artificially Waterlogged and Pitch-Contaminated Wood for Strontium Isotope Analyses

et al. 2021

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Strontium isotope ratios (87Sr/86Sr) are commonly used in archeological and forensic studies to assess if humans and fauna are local to the place they were found or not. This approach is largely unexplored for wooden artifacts recovered in archeological contexts, as wood – in the rare instances it does survive – is often poorly preserved. One of the most common ways wood is preserved is through the anoxic conditions found in waterlogged contexts. A more unusual form of preservation is through submergence in natural pitch. These depositional media contribute their own strontium values to the in vivo87Sr/86Sr wood values, which needs to be removed prior to analysis. Here we test several pre-treatment methods to remove potential strontium contamination from wood samples that were artificially immersed in seawater and pitch from Trinidad’s Pitch Lake. Water rinses and acid-leaching tests were carried out with hydrochloric acid and acetic acid to remove exogenous strontium from experimentally waterlogged wood. These tests removed large amounts of strontium from the samples and did not enable the recovery of the endogenous 87Sr/86Sr signal. For samples artificially immersed in pitch, the pre-treatments tested were based on radiocarbon dating procedures and carried out with and without the aqueous-based acid-base-acid (ABA) step. The use of organic solvents alone (methanol and toluene) removed exogenous strontium originating from the pitch. However, the ABA step eliminates large amounts of in vivo strontium from the samples. These tests show that 87Sr/86Sr values of wood are altered by the presence of pitch and water. With adequate pre-treatment using exclusively organic solvents, it may be possible to remove this contamination for samples immersed in pitch. However, the aqueous-based ABA pre-treatment should be avoided. The removal of contamination from waterlogged samples was unsuccessful with the current pre-treatment protocols and more research is needed. More importantly, and unexpectedly, 87Sr/86Sr values may extend outside of the mixing line between the wood’s endogenous strontium and the water. These results indicate the need for extreme caution when attempting to determine the provenance of waterlogged wood.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing Various Pre-treatments on Artificially Waterlogged and Pitch-Contaminated Wood for Strontium Isotope Analyses

et al. 2021

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“…Kagawa and Leavitt ; Horacek ), discriminate between species (Horacek, Jakusch, & Krehan, ), and to identify wood origin (Gori, Wehrens, La Porta, & Camin, ). Strontium stable isotopes have also demonstrated good potential for provenancing cedar ship timber (Rich et al., ). However, the isotopic composition of wood can be influenced by biological and physicochemical processes not related to geographical/climatic factors (Hajj, Poszwa, Bouchez, & Guerold, ) and for archaeological wood further care is needed as processes such as diagenesis in soils can modify wood composition (Hajj et al., ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Kagawa and Leavitt 2010;Horacek 2012), discriminate between species (Horacek, Jakusch, & Krehan, 2009), and to identify wood origin (Gori, Wehrens, La Porta, & Camin, 2015). Strontium stable isotopes have also demonstrated good potential for provenancing cedar ship timber (Rich et al, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi‐variable approach pinpoints origin of oak wood with higher precision

Akhmetzyanov

Buras

Sass‐Klaassen

et al. 2019

Journal of Biogeography

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Aim Spatial variations of environmental conditions translate into biogeographical patterns of tree growth. This fact is used to identify the origin of timber by means of dendroprovenancing. Yet, dendroprovenancing attempts are commonly only based on ring‐width measurements, and largely neglect additional tree–ring variables. We explore the potential of using wood anatomy as a dendroprovenancing tool, and investigate whether it increases the precision of identifying the origin of oak wood. Since different tree–ring variables hold different information on environmental conditions prevailing at specific times of the growing season—which vary between source regions—we hypothesize that their inclusion allows more precise dendroprovenancing. Location Europe, Spain. Taxon Quercus robur L., Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl., Quercus faginea Lam., Quercus pyrenaica Willd. Methods We sampled four oak species across Northern Spain, i.e. from the Basque country and Cantabria and—in the Basque country—from low to high elevation (topographic/latitudinal gradient). We measured multiple tree–ring variables to (a) extract complementary variables; (b) present statistical relations among them; (c) analyse region‐specific variation in their patterns based on time–series of individual trees; and (d) determine underlying climate–growth relationships. Leave‐one‐out analysis was used to test whether a combination of selected variables allowed dendroprovenancing of a randomly selected tree within the area. Results A combination of latewood width (LW) and earlywood vessel size was used to pinpoint the origin of oak wood with higher precision than ring width or LW only. Variation in LW pinpointed the wood to east and west areas, whereas variation in vessels assigned wood to locations along a latitudinal/topographic gradient. The climatic triggers behind these gradients are respectively an east–west gradient in June–July temperature and a north–south gradient in winter/spring temperatures. The leave‐one‐out analyses supported the robustness of these results. Main conclusions Integration of multiple wood–xylem anatomical variables analysed with multivariate techniques leads to higher precision in the dendroprovenancing of ring‐porous oak species.

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“…Few studies tested the added value of additional treering based chemical and anatomical variables for provenancing. The first attempts to use stable isotopes together with ring-width series showed promising results to more precisely pinpoint the origin of pinyon pines from the south-western United States (Kagawa & Leavitt, 2010), to check source of larch wood (Horacek et al, 2009), and to identify origin of archaeological cedar timber (Rich et al, 2016b). Using latewood density has also significantly increased the chances of dating conifer timber in the UK (Wilson et al, 2017) compared to tree-ring width.…”

Section: Advancing Provenancingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Kagawa & Leavitt, 2010;Horacek, 2012), discriminate between species (Horacek et al, 2009), and to identify wood origin (Gori et al, 2015). Strontium stable isotopes have also demonstrated good potential for provenancing cedar ship timber (Rich et al, 2016b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

New tools for timber provenancing

Akhmetzyanov

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To put a cedar ship in a bottle: Dendroprovenancing three ancient East Mediterranean watercraft with the 87Sr/86Sr isotope ratio

Cited by 11 publications

References 37 publications

Testing Various Pre-treatments on Artificially Waterlogged and Pitch-Contaminated Wood for Strontium Isotope Analyses

Testing Various Pre-treatments on Artificially Waterlogged and Pitch-Contaminated Wood for Strontium Isotope Analyses

Multi‐variable approach pinpoints origin of oak wood with higher precision

New tools for timber provenancing

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