Dendrochronology in the Eastern United States

Abstract

THE dream of the archæologist, for whom from the nature of his material an absolute chronology is rarely available, has been the attainment of a system of dating which should be universally valid; but diversity of conditions, as a rule, precludes anything approaching certainty when attempts are made to apply any given method of time measurement outside a more or less restricted area. For this reason much interest is attached to attempts which are being made to extend the tree-ring method of dating outside the south-western United States, where it has been applied with conspicuous success to the dating of Pueblo remains and structures. The first successful observations in the eastern United States are recorded by Prof. Charles J. Lyon, of Dartmouth College (Science, 90, 419; Nov. 3, 1939), who has compared the rings of virgin white pine felled by a hurricane in September 1938 at Wolfeboro, N.H., with buried logs of the same species uncovered in an excavation at the site of an ancient bridge abutment nearby. The skeleton plot method of Douglass gave the date of 1806 for the last ring formed in the trees used to build the bridge, a result said to be “very reasonable in the light of Wolfeboro history”. Further, from North Sutton, N.H., thirty-nine miles south of this bridge, a record of white pine was obtained for a 260-year period, establishing a link with the buried logs in a 128-year overlap between the outer rings of the latter and the inner rings of the Sutton trees. Although not sufficient for a standard scale, yet this marks a beginning in the formulation of an efficient instrument for the eastern archæologist; but it is noted that the identification in detail is less perfect than in the south-west. Apart from the cross-check, however, the rings agreed with a number of entries of drought in a diary.