Scientists determine where 400-year-old wood for houses was brought to Denmark
(ORDO NEWS) — Scientists managed to find out where wooden materials for old houses were brought to Denmark.
Dendrochronology is one of the methods of archaeological science that allows you to reconstruct the growing conditions of a tree from its growth rings.
The characteristics of each ring depend on the conditions in that year, and since each sequence of year conditions is unique, this makes it possible to accurately date when and where the tree from which the object was made lived.
However, each locality has its own chronological scale, and in the case of imported material that was brought in antiquity, this method does not work without knowing at least an approximate region of origin.
Conversely, knowing the approximate time of origin makes it easier to find the place where the tree grows.
Because of these difficulties, Alicia Van Ham-Meert and her colleagues supplemented the standard dendrochronological method with the analysis of strontium isotopes.
“In particular, we took wood samples from three old houses in the Danish cities of Aalborg and Horsens.
A good example is a specimen from a 16th-17th century house in Horsens, where dendrochronological analysis erroneously showed that the wood was Danish.
However, in terms of strontium isotopes, the material matched exactly the terrain in southern Sweden, indicating that the wood was brought from southern Sweden to Horsens and used to build the house.
This is not surprising, since Sweden at that time was part of the Kingdom of Denmark, but it is important for us to be able to distinguish between the places of origin of the objects that we find, ”the scientists explain.
The authors suggest that Halland and Skåne played an important role in the timber trade between the Danish and Swedish parts of the Kingdom of Denmark.
However, for genuine Danish wood, dendrochronological analysis has shown more reliable results than isotope analysis, which indicates the need to combine these methods.
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