Abstract
A significant part of our cultural heritage consists of wood. Research on historical wooden structures and artefacts thereby provides knowledge of people’s daily lives and the society in which they lived. Dendrochronology is a well-established dating method of wood that can also provide valuable knowledge about climate dynamics, environmental changes, silviculture, and cultural transformations. However, dendrochronology comes with some limitations that end users in cultural heritage sciences must be aware of, otherwise their surveys may not be ultimately performed. We have drawn attention to studies in which dendrochronological results have been misinterpreted, over-interpreted, or not fully utilized. On the other hand, a rigorous dendrochronological survey may not respond to the request of information in practice. To bridge this rigour-relevance gap, this article has considered and reviewed both the dendrochronology’s science-perspective and the practitioner’s and end user’s call for context appropriate studies. The material for this study consists of (i) interviews with researchers in dendrochronology and end users represented by cultural heritage researchers with focus on building conservation and building history in Sweden, and (ii) a review of dendrochronological reports and the literature where results from the reports have been interpreted. From these sources we can conclude that a continuous two-way communication between the dendrochronologists and end users often would have resulted in improved cultural heritage studies. The communication can take place in several steps. Firstly, the design of a sampling plan, which according to the current standard for sampling of cultural materials often is required, is an excellent common starting point for communication. Secondly, the survey reports could be developed with a more extensive general outline of the method and guidance in how to interpret the results. Thirdly, the potential contribution from dendrochronology is often underused, foreseeing historical information on local climate, silviculture, and choice of quality of the wooden resource, as the focus most often is the chronological dating. Finally, the interpretation of the results should consider all the available sources where dendrochronology is one stake for a conciliant conclusion.
Highlights
For thousands of years, wood has been used as a resource and has become a crucial part of our cultural heritage
An essential part of our history is made of wood, and the development of methods to analyse and date wooden objects is crucial for documentation, research, and conservation of our cultural heritage
We do not want to point out researchers who have performed deficient studies; instead, we want to increase the understanding of dendrochronology to improve future studies
Summary
Wood has been used as a resource and has become a crucial part of our cultural heritage. An essential part of our history is made of wood, and the development of methods to analyse and date wooden objects is crucial for documentation, research, and conservation of our cultural heritage. Annual growth rings in trees are archives of climate, environment, and cultural changes, allowing for age determination of ecological states and transformations [33,34], natural disturbances [35], and climatological changes [36,37], from which cultural responses can often be interpreted and derived [38,39] In such contexts, dendrochronological data have been used to interpret societal transformations due to, for instance, land use and changes in silviculture [31,40], plague [38,41], or food crisis [42]. In this article, for the sake of simplicity, we will use the basic term dendrochronology
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